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I got back last night from a road trip around New England. Even though I worked on Monday and Tuesday, I feel like I haven’t been present in my life since Pride weekend, so now I’m coming back to life. When I was in Madrid, we spent our time with Gabby’s friend from grad school, Mathilde, who is Dutch and lives in Amsterdam.

Mathilde is spending a few weeks of her summer traveling around our great nation, and the two of them were planning a road trip around New England. Obviously, New England in the summer is one of the best things a human can experience, so Meera and I started feeding them recs. Then, the road trip became a four-person excursion.

We started driving after work on Tuesday, staying a night at Meera’s parent’s house. The next day, we went to Cape Cod and spent the night in New England gay Mecca Provincetown. Thursday was our biggest driving day, ending near Acadia National Park. We spent the day after enjoying the park and watching fireworks in Bar Harbor. We began our descent down the coast to Boston, and woke up in the city yesterday to drive home.

You can’t hit the road if you don’t have a car. After work on Tuesday, we rented a brand-new Buick at JFK. All four of us were so excited to get going. These first hours were spent debriefing our heavy Pride weekends and figuring out where to stop for dinner. Initially, we wanted to stop somewhere in Rhode Island for dinner, like Newport. Unfortunately, we got on the road a bit late, restaurants close early there, and it started raining profusely for the majority of our drive.

Everywhere we would go on our trip are places I’ve been before after living and loving New England for six years. I felt a lot of ownership over the itinerary because I know what’s wowed me since my first trip to Boston and Cape Cod after my sophomore year of high school when I decided I would do everything in my power to get into BU. Meera is obviously a Massachusetts native and Gabby used to visit me, but neither of them had been to Provincetown or Acadia. Mathilde is very well traveled and has seen so much of the American West but hasn’t been to New England at all. As someone so informed and interested in American culture but is also very Dutch, I looked forward to showing her some peak American experiences in some places that are also more European than the rest of the country.

Since I’m a pro and have seen it all, I had one non-negotiable of the trip: trying pizza in Connecticut. If you’ve ever spoken to a CT native, you’d learn that they are very protective of their pizza. In New Haven, there are three famous spots that people have endless debates about. One of my friends who went to college in the state dated an heir to one of the pizza dynasties, and hearing those made me want a slice.

Connecticut is constantly crapped on for having little local character and being a flyover/drive-through state. I’ve never given it a chance despite driving and taking trains through it countless times. I’ve learned as a New York transplant how people love to find neighborhoods, restaurants, or sports teams to make fun of so they can feel more like a New Yorker. In the spirit of wanting to be less of a poser, I need to try things out so if I do end up jaded I can be justified. Plus, who doesn’t love pizza?

The sun already set when we pulled into nondescript New Haven. Modern Apizza was closed, and Sally’s and Frank Pepe’s are on the same block. Sally’s had a line out the door, and Frank Pepe’s had a dedicated parking lot so they won. I think we accidentally went to the casual and takeout part instead of the nicer sit-down building. We shared four pizzas from a very kind waiter and loved all of them. What makes this pizza unique is that it’s coal-fired instead of oven-fired, so the bottom is all charred but not in a bad way. The thin slices were hot and came two at a time on rectangular tins. I think my favorites were The Special (so much random stuff on it) and the mushroom, arugula, and gorgonzola slices. It wasn’t the best pizza I’ve ever had by any means, but I get why people like it so much. I’ll have to go try the other two places some other time.

We finished our drive to Fall River, MA listening to our collaborative 16-hour playlist we thought we would never tire of. It was around midnight, and Meera’s parents were already asleep. They had set out lots of random fun food for us, though: corn, watermelon, Italian cookies, hummus, and — my favorite — manousheh, which is a flatbread caked with za’atar. Especially being away from our families, we were so grateful to be in a normal suburban house with generous parents.

We do a bit of snacking before getting ready for bed, Gabby and Mathilde in Meera’s brother’s old room, still adorned with Steelers (can you believe it?) memorabilia. There’s always a sneakiness I’ve felt anytime I’ve slept in a girlfriend’s childhood bed, but Meera’s is very comfortable. Maybe it’s because her room just has teenager stuff in it since she didn’t always live in that house. The floral sheets and Legos in my childhood bedroom have an eerieness. At least I’ll never see them again.

We were early risers this whole trip. Meera was up extra early to say goodbye to her parents before they left to start their days. A few of us took showers. I love showering there because it really has the coziness of a lived in, bathtub shower. I had washed my hair on Monday and wanted to wait until going in the ocean or something to wash it again. Little did I know, I wouldn’t wash my hair at all on the trip.

We ate more of the food they had for us and turned on the news since Mathilde wanted to watch, and the Diddy trial verdict was announced. With the mixed charges signaling a victory for the predator, we spent the morning lamenting and talking about our justice system. Lots of our trip was comparing American to Dutch things, and I am so envious of the problems the Netherlands has. Mathilde was so dumbfounded by so many of the systems we don’t have in place, and we were laughing at the things they do. Did you know Dutch school districts are given five free days off for students and teachers each year that they can pick based on community events they encourage their students to attend?

Gabby and Mathilde wanted to see Meera’s hometown, so she drove us around Fall River in spots I’ve seen before but don’t tire of. The town is quite hilly and has very distinct neighborhoods. Like many other Massachusetts towns on bodies of water, its heyday was during the textile industry boom. The town hall sits literally on top of a highway next to a beautiful bridge. Under it is Battleship Cove, the largest collection of World War II-era naval vessels in the world. Parts of Don’t Look Up were filmed with the hulking ships.

Time to make the pilgrimage (pun intended) to the Cape. If you’ve never been to Cape Cod before, the region is shaped like a flexed arm, with a heavy base jetting out from the mainland, turning upwards, and getting smaller until the fist that is Provincetown. The towns around the base of the cape have abysmal names like Bourne and Buzzards Bay, which have gorgeous bridges that connect you to the region. We needed gas and bathrooms, so we stopped at a gas station and CVS right before the bridge in Buzzards Bay. I remember seeing a TikTok once about how adult vacations or outings are all suddenly based off of how often people can find bathrooms, and I unfortunately found it quite prescient for our week.

We got back in the car, crossed the bridge, and started passing by all sorts of famous towns for the rich and Kennedy but unable to see them from the road. The roads are eventually small enough that you drive directly through towns instead of being on a highway, complete with two-story hotels and beach gear stores with inflatable pool toys screaming at you.

For lunch, Gabby got a recommendation from our friend Julia to try a place called Mac’s. It’s in Wellfleet, a town I’d only been to for their drive-in movie theater, and is a takeout seafood shack on the bay with benches. It’s a quintessential Cape experience of a place that we had to drive down winding hills with idyllic houses to get to. Gabby said that living in New York makes her forget the feeling of being in places as white as this one, which I unfortunately can’t relate to. Although the clientele is all white, everyone working at Mac’s is Jamaican and playing reggae over the speakers.

I pay over $30 for a delicious, maybe-worth-it-but-I’m-not-sure lobster roll, and we all shared clam strips. To get to the bathroom, each of us had to walk along the bay to a harbor house that had all sorts of people around it getting their boats in and out of the calm waters. Afterwards, we walked next door to an art gallery, but the main attraction was a smushy bulldog Gabby pet for a while. His owner, who was working at the gallery, insisted that he is not a dog but something else. She told us about another dog she knows from the shop that is “very naughty” and has bitten multiple people with his owners dealing with lawsuits.

Our check-in time to our motel was at 4, and lunch took up enough time that we would get there around 3:30. We listened to the start of a podcast along the way about a newly out lesbian journalist’s summer in P-Town interviewing the people that make it what it is. We laughed at a lot of. Technically, were not staying in Provincetown but in the town over, Truro. The second time I went to the Cape, my family and I stayed at an old, creaky house on the beach in Truro that I brought college friends to part of. I remember tons of seals in the water and my mom being mad at my dad for enthusiastically buying us alcohol.

Provincetown is one of the gayest places in the country and is similar to Fire Island for its northeast beachy gayety. You can take a 90-minute ferry from Boston. It is one of my favorite places in the world because it feels like the end of the world in a good way. Although it’s very gay, it’s also fun for families (like mine when I went), so walking down the street when you see tons of people, you can see a group of guys in matching speedos near a typical nuclear family. P-Town is busier than most other places on the Cape because there are lots of shops and restaurants on a few pedestrian blocks.

Outside of the town center is a bunch of gorgeous houses, and outside of that is a strip of motels along the beach in Truro. The part our motel was on is on the P-town border right next to the Entering: sign each Massachusetts town has. The word motel evokes grossness, but this one was not seedy in the slightest. We had a balcony overlooking the massive dunes of the Cape Cod National Seashore.

The motel had a beach, so we changed into our swimsuits and hit it. After walking for a while up to the shore, we realized there was barely anyone swimming in it because the water was cold and filled with seaweed, which was also washed up in poundfuls on the shore along with crab parts and shells. This would be a terrible beach day for people that aren’t excited by small things like our group is.

Mathilde kept asking us if she could skinny dip at some point on the trip since that is part of her life in the Netherlands and we kept insisting that that’s a taboo thing here. She did not get to skinny dip, but she did enjoy swimming in a swimsuit. I barely got in the water and neither did Meera, but Mathilde and Gabby swam a few times. I stared out at the ocean in front of me and P-Town to my right off in the distance with the towering pilgrim monument. The four of us read our books and talked about them on our walk back to the motel. I was glad that I didn’t get my hair dirty and need to wash it yet.

We bought tickets to a drag show for 7:30. Gabby split off from us to walk from the beach into town while the three of us showered and changed for the night, which we hoped to be rambunctious. I had done research before the trip that Cape Cod’s bus system is frequent enough and could take us into town from the motel. We weren’t completely sure where the bus stop was, but we saw a group of three older ladies hanging outside and asked if they were waiting for the bus. They were, and we chatted with them while we waited. One is from New Hampshire, so we naturally connected. On the block I used to live on in Manchester, the trees would be strewn about with tons of soft white lights during the winter. It turns out her son is the person that put them up. Why is the world so small!

The Cape Cod bus is how all buses should be. All fixed routes are free, and they’ll stop wherever you want along the route as long as you wave. You can also get off anywhere, too, so no distinct stops really need to exist. It’s comfortable and spacious. We watched the beach fall away into trees and beautiful houses. From Find My Friends, Gabby looked far away. When we got off of the bus, we passed by a restaurant that Mathilde insisted we take a picture of her in front of called the Lobster Pot. She’s been obsessed with lobsters the whole trip (and wearing a lobster necklace), and it turns out Pot is a Dutch slur for lesbians. As I took her pictures, Gabby appeared from the street. Perfect timing.

We saw the drag show at The Crown and Anchor, a huge bar with lots of different spaces for eating, drinking, and watching live shows. After help from multiple staffers, we found the back room for the show. Tina Burner is a drag queen on the current All Stars season of Drag Race, and she has a show in P-Town all summer themed around old TV shows. She does monologues, jokes, and lip syncs to real songs and parodies she writes based off of TV shows with old news clips or strange commercials playing while she changes outfits. It was a really well-produced show with screens and lights and a special drink menu (with a yummy spicy marg that had too much ice).

Mathilde and Gabby especially loved the show. Tina is a great performer and oozes kindness. Each time anyone tipped her, she seemed genuinely thankful in a way you wouldn’t expect from a famous queen. She also had a speech at the end of what was a sometimes political show about protecting P-Town, drag, and queerness as a whole.

I enjoyed the show but did not feel like the right audience. I like to think I’m culturally tapped in, but I really hadn’t heard of the majority of these shows (Designing Women sounds really good but, again, never heard of it) because Tina and her audience are white elder-millennial gay men. There was a guy in front of us snapping at every slightly political thing she said. Some of the clips she included are things that were funny at the time but in hindsight I now feel my skin crawl. The existence of clips like Bed Intruder and Sweet Brown aren’t inherently racist, but I think the way we used to laugh at them feels something like it. I thought this in hindsight when rewatching the videos a few years ago. This audience clearly didn’t feel that way.

She also had a segment related to drag race and showed clips of different fights in the show. In these clips, she included fights between now-canceled queens Shangela and Sharon Needles because both of them have multiple allegations against them on the sexual misconduct spectrum. There are so many other drag queens that aren’t problematic and also have great fight clips, so I don’t understand why she would include these and find it normal. But maybe I’m just being too woke about it.

After we left the show, we walked around town before settling on a random spot for dinner to sit outside and people watch. Mathilde and I talked about wokeness, and any topic about leftism is fun with someone from such a, in many ways, progressive country. The menu at this restaurant was bizarre, and we shared chowder fries. I got a peanut butter burger, which was just a meh cheeseburger with a shmear of peanut butter.

We wanted to dance, but all of the dancey clubs didn’t seem like the kind of place that would want girls around. We settled on a bar and watched a drag queen and a guy on a piano sing solos and duets while we sipped drinks. Mathilde had her first Downeast cider. Drag Race fans would be glad to know that Tammie Brown walked into the bar and sat for a while. We had a great time watching and singing along.

It started to get rowdier as a show nearby let out, but we had to leave to get our bus back to the motel. We hopped on, and the bus turned its lights off as it slunk through P-Town’s streets, stopping at everyone’s hotels. We got off at ours, took flash pictures in front of the Entering: Provincetown sign and went to bed, setting early alarms for our biggest driving day.

We wanted to get up early and see some nature outside of whatever semblance of it our motel had to offer. We drove to a lot near Race Point Beach, the northernmost beach on the cape. Where we parked turned out to be almost a mile from the beach, but the walk was a paved path through something of a forest. I was concerned about timing, but our meandering girls were ripe for meandering. Mathilde and Gabby are wowed by so much, from little flowers to tiny bugs that I naturally walk by. We passed Provincetown’s small airport, a clear area fenced off around lush greenery.

After walking up some dunes, we found the beach. When I was 16 and here for the first time, my family went to this beach and I remember sitting and reading The Crucible for summer reading homework. I thought this was the perfect place to think about seeing Goody Proctor with the devil. The tide was extremely low that day, and we walked on the softest sand my feet have ever touched before eventually getting to the water.

Today, the tide looked much more normal. We passed by shark warning signs because this and Truro is where you see a lot of seals, which means a lot of sharks. Right when we got near the water, Ben called me. He’s in Toronto for a Melee tournament, so we chatted while he walked around and sat in a park. He showed me a massive spider that crawled onto his backpack and looked like something you’d see in Australia. He debated whether to go to the top of the CN Tower for fun, which he ended up doing. The other girls walked around the sand and gasped at all the seals occasionally bobbing their heads up and down.

We turned around and walked back to the car. Meera and I debated about the ethics of adoption and got the other two into it, but they walked much faster than us and ended up going to the park’s visitor center staffed with rangers. We walked up a spiral staircase and looked at an overlook, chatting with an older couple of artists doing a residency at this tiny old house on the beach we could see from our perch. We went back downstairs to the gift shop where Mathilde bought a Mary Oliver book and asked about things like the ethics of the airport existing and indigenous tribe involvement in preserving the area. We talked to some nice staffers that clammed up during those questions, including one that told Mathilde to keep asking tough questions in life. Otherwise, they were very knowledgeable and informative about how they’re preserving and rebuilding these ecosystems.

What an incredible start to the day. We thought, What could get better than this? Unfortunately, it was the best part. We drove a bit and stopped in Wellfleet again at a bakery Meera found with great reviews called Blue Willow. The inside was crammed as is and only getting more packed with the Fourth-of-July travelers swarming in on this day before the holiday. We got perfect breakfast sandwiches and ate them outside while watching a big, fluffy dog pace back and forth with his tongue out. Gabby and Mathilde shared a cinnamon bun sandwich that wasn’t as obscene as it sounded.

Mathilde wanted a P-Town wearable souvenir of some kind, but we left before the stores opened. She saw a hat she liked at, of all places, the CVS in Buzzards Bay and asked if we could stop there to get it. This ended up being a blessing and a curse. At first, it felt like a curse because we had to brave through extreme traffic to cross from one side of the shore to the other when we wouldn’t have to otherwise. It ended up being a blessing because it made a different highway accessible that would allow us to avoid driving through Boston.

In the moment, I was so stressed. Of course the traffic sucked and I had high hopes for the day of stopping in Portsmouth, NH and/or Portland, ME for meals and sightseeing. However, I had a more pressing matter. A little after I got in the car from breakfast, I was touching my back and felt what seemed like an extra-large zit. I started scratching it because it felt perfect for popping, but I removed my finger after and saw a tick in my nail. A tick was just on my back up near my neck! Out of instinct, I flicked it away. Now, I’m worrying about if I’m getting a tick-borne illness and worrying that I or my friends could get another since I flicked the tick somewhere else into the car. I was freaking out for the rest of this chunk and was anxiously awaiting our arrival to CVS.

When we got out of the car at the gas station next door, I started taking stuff out of the back seat and shaking it around, looking for the intruder. Gabby with her hawk eyes found it under the seat and got it out of the car. She was my superhero. I was so relieved. There was a mark where the tick was on me, but nothing has happened. Plus, a tick would have to be on me for a long time and be a certain kind for me to get Lyme. I calmed down, and Mathilde got her actually lovely blue Cape Cod hat.

Mathilde wanted to drive, so Meera was in the passenger seat helping her through Masshole driving. She did great. This also meant that she had control of aux. We first listened to a really interesting podcast episode about Acadia and the Wabanaki people that lived on the land for 10,000 years only for the Rockefellers to get credit for making Acadia what we know it to be today after paving roads. The podcast also got into the difference between Western science and indigenous practices, showing how two different research teams, one without indigenous input, conducted research on the same thing and got totally different results. The four of us had a lot to talk about for a while about it, and I came into Acadia looking at it very differently than I did the first time I went.

Our ETA kept climbing, and traffic was terrible from Lowell to Kennebunk. We had to get to the hotel before 10 p.m. to check in or else we wouldn’t get our keys until the next day, so we couldn’t just show up whenever. Each crawl was a slash at our itinerary, and I was very nervous about us not making it in time. When it was time for dinner, we thought it would just be best to get something for takeout that was ready when we got there and eat it from the car. Both fortunately for my taste buds and Mathilde and unfortunately for my desire to see and show more of the region, we ended up getting Chipotle right off of an exit in Portland.

Mathilde’s birthday is, coincidentally, July 4, and we arrived at Chipotle when it became her birthday in the Netherlands. Her family called her and sang, which was fun to listen to. For her birthday, she also insisted on playing Dutch music for a while, which started fun but I was excited when it ended. Lots of Klezmer-y sounds mixed with 80s rock. I found a few bangers, but her and I gravitate towards very different music despite being a lot alike otherwise.

We were out of traffic, but the sun was setting and I was ready to not be in a car. We ended up driving for 10 or 11 hours that day. I thought that I could beat the local newser in me that worries about Fourth of July weekend traffic despite driving up an insane route that most New Englanders wouldn’t want to do on a trafficless day. We turned off of Bangor and drove up and down hills with odd businesses both touristy and not on each side. Gabby started a campaign for Mathilde to try hibachi at a spot we drove past for her birthday tomorrow, which I was very against but wanted to let them get to that conclusion.

Our motel was in Trenton, a rural town outside of Acadia, off the side of the highway. It’s sign read Spend a night, not a fortune. We booked a cottage, which looked so cute in a line of its siblings. I felt good energy especially from our last motel not living up to the seediness of its connotation. Getting our keys from the manager was relatively fine and he used to live in Queens, so things felt good. However, this one was definitely a motel in all senses of the word. Meera and I are, like normal people, scared of bugs. Mathilde is not and prefers to set them outside instead of killing them. I searched through each We had a few moths inside, some spiders, and even a baby cockroach. Additionally, there was a ghastly wasp between Meera and I’s room’s window glass and screen. If we opened the window, he would get in. Even though we weren’t planning on it, we were afraid of him for a long time.

Everything just felt gross. The bed was cardboard (but the blankets and pillows were comfy), the sink, TV, and chairs (one with a cigarette burn) were all in the main room, and everything just felt too accessible to the outside world. Gabby burned some incense to ward off the evil. I could not calm down. After all of that driving (that I did none of), this was a total buzzkill of a day full of buzzkills. I needed to shower, and this shower was atrocious, super tiny and too high up to get everything right. Was I being a diva? I don’t think so. This was the only place we were staying in for multiple nights. I was very happy to share a bed with Meera and feel protected from the evils around us.

I didn’t sleep too bad and was less afraid of my trappings, excited to get out to Acadia. Acadia is the only national park in the northeast, and I went once before when I lived in New Hampshire with three of my best friends. We all met at the news station, and only one of us still lives and works there. It was such a fun weekend, and I talked about it constantly with these girls that I had to self-censor. I wanted to capture that essence of wonder and exploration with these girls from enjoying the majesty of Acadia to ogling at the cute shops in Bar Harbor nearby.

I drove for the first time on this trip. We stopped first at a place called Farmstand Bakery. It was very cute inside but the coffee wasn’t great. The food was fine, though. We were already seeing families in Americana and Fourth of July merch. It was a bit jarring to remember that there are a lot of people like this even as our country commits atrocities at home and abroad, but I also am in a bubble. This was great for Mathilde to see, though.

Mathilde wanted to drive through Acadia, so she took the wheel for part of the day and we switched so she could be a passenger. Everyone was already ogling at the little ponds and hills off of the highway, so I knew all three were in for a treat. We entered the park and filled up our water bottles at the visitors center where I could print out my park pass to put on the car. We passed by lots of cute Leave no trace signs before entering the park properly.

Part of why Acadia was so exciting for me the first time I went was because I thought you needed to be physically active to enjoy a national park, but I learned that you can get your fill just by staring out the window on long, winding roads and parking at tiny almost-lots off the side of the road to walk around the immediate area. Our first chance to do this was on a wetland that looked lush but the signs said it’s being restored after a history of logging in the area. We saw a little frog pop out and a sizable beaver dam.

We drove the main Acadia loop twice. If we had another day, we’d explore the other half of the park. The next chance we got to park off to the side was a pond full of a mosaic of lily pads that were so beautiful it made Mathilde cry (one of many times that day because she feels very deeply). We then went to an overlook to see the other side of the bay and talk to a park ranger that did not like Meera’s Rhode Island is for haters shirt.

We stopped next at Thunder Hole, which I learned is only thunderous at specific times of the day. When I went the first time, it was thundering. What that means is the tide comes into this rocky area hard, fast, and explosively into the air. Meera and I sat on a rock while Mathilde and Gabby ventured down them to the water. We were close to Otter Cove, which is another place to walk around and look at mountains, the ocean, rocks, and trees. Someone hung an American flag upside down nearby that was gone by our second loop around.

The park wasn’t as crowded as I assumed it would be on a holiday. All kinds of tourists were there wearing varying degrees of patriotism. There were lots of nice people that took our pictures and had small talk with us, especially on our hike later. My favorite part of the trip last time was going up Cadillac Mountain, which you need a specific pass for certain time to drive up. The views were incredible with a few points to park off to the side and ogle. At one point, my mom called me at the time that I had the best signal of the day.

We hit the top of the mountain and walked around for a short time, using the bathroom and getting taffy from the gift shop. Gabby witnessed a fight outside as some mom’s friend lost their kid for a moment. We drove back down and kept on our loop while listening to oldies and appreciating the nature around us. It’s a bittersweet thing having beautifully paved roads on natural land, using cars for the best possible reason at a slow enough pace to truly bask in everything.

The girls wanted to hike so they picked a moderate trail, and I was nervous. I know I walk like crazy around New York, but I’ve never successfully hiked before. I’ve done plenty of mostly flat walks in nature, but I’ve tried truly hiking twice and had to turn around both times because I was too tired. It sounds kind of dumb to say out loud but I was nervous even though these are three people that would be so accommodating to me.

We settled on a hike from Sand Beach, which required some serious luck parking. Mathilde somehow nabbed an incredible spot and with the window down loudly asked us Is this spot perfect or what? and a disgruntled mom walking by said You’re way out. We obviously talked about this for the rest of the trip. We descended onto the beach and saw all kinds of people having a beach day in normal hiking clothes and beachwear. We sat atop a pile of rocks and ate our burritos we got from the bakery earlier. Mathilde and I got these huevos ranchero-esque burritos that slapped while Gabby and Meera got sweeter varieties that weren’t as satisfying.

Time to hike the Great Head trail. I was already in tick fear mode from yesterday along with the physical endurance I was about to do in the dirt. I didn’t like nature until I was 15 at sleepaway camp and took a walk by myself outside of the camp grounds in Wisconsin and tred barefoot on the softest grass they’d ever touched surrounded by high bushes in the golden hour glow. I don’t need to get maximum satisfaction from doing much more than that.

The start of the hike was a lot of stairs and I thought Ugh, really? Then, we had to do a rock scramble, which is when you have to climb up rocks in a way that’s more intense than just walking around but not involving as much upper body strength as real scary climbing. I was hating this so much because if this was the beginning in the hot sun, what was I supposed to do?

Thankfully, that was the hardest part of the hike and I started getting into it. You eventually get into a groove in which you’re moving so quickly naturally solving the puzzle of how to get to the next point. We were surrounded by picturesque pines and rocks with a few irises along the way. Part of the hike was through woods, but most of it was more open. We reached what felt like a halfway point when we started seeing people coming from the other side that we would start to go downhill. It was nice to be in a culture in which people say hi to each other and talk about the conditions they’d just experienced. At one point, we decided to go off of the path onto a rock that luckily gave us the best view of the whole beach, cliffs, forest, and The Beehive, which is a green hump of a mountain.

We ended up making some sort of wrong turn on our loop and had to scale down the rocks we initially climbed up, which was much easier than getting up them. When we finished, I felt so satisfied and proud of myself. I wish I would have been this brave in New Hampshire when I lived around hiking all the time (well I tried — that was the site of one of my failed hikes). I think it took over an hour, and I felt sweaty and happy.

Gabby and Mathilde are crazy and wanted to swim in the ultra-cold water, which even constant swimmer Mathilde said was the coldest she’d been in. While they played on the beach, Meera and I sat on rocks reading and talking. When the girls returned, they had created kelp jewelry in belts and bracelets.

We returned to our car, and Gabby and Mathilde wanted to do a bit more hiking. At this point, I was not interested in more exertion because I still wanted the girls to see Bar Harbor. They were dead set on hibachi for dinner, but I said we’d have to drive around the town first and see if they still felt that way. They said they would hike for an hour around the Jordan Pond loop, so Meera and I dropped them off while we went to check out Bar Harbor since she’d never seen it.

An hour was the perfect amount of time to leave the park, drive around town, and come back. It’s an idyllic town at the end of the world with all the tourist trappings of the northeast, filled with artsy stores, seafood spots overlooking the water, and endless lines for endless ice cream shops. My crew and I stayed at a (nice) motel here last time and spent a lot of time in town perusing bookstore shelves and sitting on benches at the park on the water. Meera and I saw lots of traffic as people flooded in for fireworks.

We returned to the girls, who clearly would not be ready for their 6:30 pickup. I read a sign and learned that Gabby Time is, as always, relative because what she said/thought was an hour loop was almost three hours long. Meera and I checked out the clear pond for a while, got our books out, and sat on a bench hoping they would realize they needed to turn around. Thankfully, they did.

Meera took the wheel for this parking challenge. We spent a while looping the town and debating the legality of certain spaces. One perfect one appeared but we were on the other side of the road and didn’t want to provoke the suburban minivan woman that would take the spot. We eventually got a good spot in the parking lot of a baseball field that wasn’t a far walk from town.

What an American scene for Mathilde to watch. I’m used to all sorts of Midwestern and Northeastern small Fourth of July fireworks, but it’s definitely culture shock to come from a country in which wearing a flag is rare. We went to this souvenir shop called Debbah’s that gives you these great drawstring bags with each purchase, and it’s the only good souvenir shop in the world. I spent a lot of time there on my last trip and got a cute Bar Harbor crewneck.

The New England experience is having oversized, warm tops with a place on it, so this time I got a huge, gray Maine hoodie. Meera got a burgundy Bar Harbor crew with yellow letters, and Mathilde wanted some weird lobster merch, so she got a red short sleeve with Stinky’s lobster on it. By the grace of God, the hibachi spot was closed. We decided to grab to-go crab melts from a spot called Melt that rocked our socks off, plus something we thought was a popover but was actually called a blueberry popper. It was like a sweet, sugary eggroll with cream and blueberries inside.

We sat in a terrible spot in the grass and waited for the fireworks for a while. I saw a massive spider crawl right behind Meera so I turned my phone flashlight on to find it and destroy it or at least shoo it away. Random olds near us asked Are you doing a science experiment? They later yelled at a couple in front of us that brought their humanlike doodles to the fireworks that immediately freaked out and became dogs again.

I’ve seen enough fireworks. I don’t really care. But it was nice, I guess. Gabby and Mathilde walked to get a better view. I just cared about leaving early so we could grab ice cream without a line and book it. We at least achieved the line-less ice cream at a place called CJ’s my friend recommended to me for their blueberry soft serve. Great rec.

We walked back to our cars along with the rest of the world, including a big family running down the middle of the street laughing and millions of small children getting sleepy. I started to feel nauseous on the car ride home and felt like we were going too fast down the dark, windy roads. Mathilde and Gabby planned to wake up super early to watch the sun rise in the park and they would come back to wake us up to start the drive back while they slept. I set alarms for 8 a.m. for the latest possible wakeup in case something happened. Gabby told me she was so happy we didn’t do hibachi and spent time in Bar Harbor, which was the equivalent of giving me a passionate kiss.

I woke up to my 8 a.m. alarm. I guess the girls decided to sleep instead. We packed up and hit the road for my last time driving on the trip. There was barely any traffic for most of Maine until we hit Kennebunk. Mathilde said she was finally warming up to the idea of Dunkin’, and we all cheered. I’m not a breakfast person, but Gabby and Mathilde are. We ended up accidentally stopping in Pittsfield, the same town we got gas in on the way up. This Dunks had a fake fireplace in the back and actually seemed somewhat hospitable. I got a latte with their new mint chocolate chip flavor, which will be my new standby. I also tried their new chipotle wakeup wrap and am so lucky most chains are embracing chipotle as a flavor. Mathilde, who had previously only had black coffee from a Dunkin in New York, liked her flavored latte.

We drove and listened to music through the decades while Mathilde told us about the Efteling, the Netherlands’ premiere theme park and modeled after storybook characters. She played music from some of the rides that clearly held a lot of fun nostalgia and told us about holle bolle gijs, which are these disturbing-looking paper trash receptacles that speak.

For lunch, I thought we could stop in my favorite city in New Hampshire, Portsmouth. The girls wanted a vegetable in their systems, so I immediately thought of The Green Room, a spot with all the salads, smoothies, and acai bowls a bruncher could think of. As we walked up the alley to the shop — lo and behold — I saw my friends Chris and Richard holding their Green Room smoothies. We screamed and chatted for a while. Chris and I started on the same day at the news station, and I see him and Richard every time they come to New York. The world is so small, and I am so lucky it is small in this way!

We grabbed food and sat outside, watching sleepy couples and young families stroll past a live jazz band. I got avocado “toast” on sweet potato slices. I wanted them to see more of Portsmouth, so we walked around for a while. It was poppin’ with lots of live music and tourist families. We walked through a gift shop then Mathilde wanted to check out some jewelry stores because she collects and sells antiques.

While she did that, I went over to Popovers on the Square to get just that, since we hadn’t had one the whole trip. A popover is a hard on the outside, soft and eggy on the inside pastry made in a muffin pan that explodes from the top. We sat on a table by the water and shared it with some maple butter.

We returned to the car and kept it moving. Traffic wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and we played all sorts of silly games in the car imitating noises and blasting ABBA. We were staying at Ben’s house in Roxbury while he was on a vacation of his own, and I was nagging his roommates telling them our ETA.

Mathilde had never been to Boston before, and as a true academic I knew she would love it. She saw the lines of brownstones and a minute later was talking about teaching here. Boston really is like that; you just know once you see the architecture if it’s yours. After Ben said we’d have to eat a ticket if we parked nearby, we found a better spot from Spot Hero.

We waited for the Green Line and chatted with an older lady that seems to be in love with LeAnn Rimes. We got off at Copley and walked Newbury Street to the Boston Common like I’ve done countless times. We walked through the Freedom Trail to Quincy Market and met up with Mathilde’s friend Sajal. The five of us saw Margaritaville, which they’d never heard of, and decided to get a drink. The frozen marg was actually great.

We walked along the water and through the North End on an unsuccessful cannoli hunt. Sajal departed, and we took the train to Ilona in the South End for a nice meal to cap off our trip. Sleepy, we decided to dance anyway and try Dani’s Queer Bar, which opened recently and I wanted to try. The huge space’s first floor is for sitting and talking, but the basement is for dancing. At first, we cringed at the college students trying to dance, but as it filled up and the music got better, we had a great time. We talked to everyone and felt like the hottest girls in the room. I slept on a couch in Ben’s living room.

Before heading home, we had to stop for coffee, so we chose Boston’s superior chain: Pavement. We showed them Brookline and stopped at the BU campus location, which was the emptiest I’ve ever seen it. Mathilde was already looking at BU’s job board before remembering the state higher education is in in the U.S.

We drove down Connecticut’s prettiest parkway (Merritt) and stopped at a rest stop with an insane bathroom line. Mathilde threatened to go in the men’s room before an employee started routing women there anyway. For lunch, we asked Gabby’s roommate for recs in Norwalk as she is a native, and she directed us to Valencia. The Venezuelan place felt like a beach, and we had possibly the best meal on the trip with refreshing ceviche and mutant arepas.

We listened to 90s music and me talking Mathilde’s ear off about Robert Moses as we returned our rental car and took a sweltering Revel home. Even though a lot of the trip was stuff I’ve seen before, it’s always nice to see it through my loves’ new eyes. I would be a much worldlier traveler if New England didn’t keep me infatuated for so long.

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