Hotel Coolidge got a room for Bob -- and the Wi-Fi too!

Click image, bigger, pretty colors.

Built in 1849, directly across Main Street from the railroad station, the Hotel Coolidge (named for U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, born in Vermont) has the Wi-Fi! If you're reading this post, that's proof. I'm in Room 201.

Such train station hotels were called drummers' hotels -- hotels for travelling salesmen, commercial travellers.

It's a bit past midnight, and about every 20 minutes I can hear a freight train go past, I can hear the excruciatingly beautiful train whistle wailing in the night. Does everybody think this is beautiful music, or just me?

The Amtrak Montrealer passenger train also stops in White River Junction. It's jam-packed in ski season as New Yorkers head for the Canadian ski resorts, but this is the region's most popular moment, the exploding of the leaves of the Autumn forests of New England. Quite frankly, I'm damn lucky I got a room. This is the second time I've stayed here, and I just love the crap out of this hotel and this town.

This is the only forest on Earth that explodes every Autumn in these spectacular colors, red, brown, yellow. From Ontario, through Quebec and the Maritimes, from Ohio, Pennsylvania, northern New York State, these trees have evolved a trick. As winter nears, the trees, desperate for energy and food so they can survive the bleak, harsh winter, dye their leaves as color filters, anticipating which sunlight frequencies will give them the most energy for a final month of photosynthesis, turning sunlight into storable food energy, into sugars.

I hope I got that reasonably right. But in these northern latitudes, and in the comparable latitudes of the southern hemisphere, there are lots of trees and forests, but only this one in North America does the spectacular color changes.

I got a late start Sunday afternoon, but things worked out wonderfully. My nephew and niece-in-law invited me for Chinese takeout dinner at their modest 2-storey colonial house about 5 miles north of White River Junction, and delayed their two daughters' bedtime just so Unkie Monkie (that's me) could dine with them -- and deliver a wooden rocking cradle for their dollies. I carried each of them upstairs. (The big one weighs 40 pounds, and I suspect mom and dad are soon going to break the tragic news to her that in future, she walks upstairs to bed, the days of being belovedly carried upstairs are coming to a close.)

It's raining and chilly. And wonderful and perfect in Vermont (named by the first wave of European settlers, the French: Green Mountain).

My nieces are Anya and Nori, and they knew instantly what the wooden rocking cradle was, and liked it a lot. The next time I see it, it will have a doll in it.

One of the most common and most brilliant of the color trees is the sugar maple (Acer saccharum), and I guess you all know what this tree will make from the Autumn sunlight: maple syrup, and Vermont has managed to convince the world that they make the most delicious maple syrup, as the French have made their name synonymous with the finest wine, the Scots are whom you buy the finest (and only) Scotch from. They'll tap the sugar maples for their delicious sap in midwinter when the trees have lost every leaf and the forests are bare in the snow.

I should sleep soon, but I'm happy and excited and on an Adventure. Tomorrow I cross the Connecticut River into New Hampshire ("Live Free or Die" is their motto on the auto licence plates -- a grim choice) and drive about 3 hours northeast to the Presidential Mountains to ride the steam train to the top of Mount Washington.

This will put me in the region -- U.S. Route 3 -- where Betty and Barney Hill believed they encountered flying saucer aliens one night in September 1961. Before you start laughing, read the book about their experience, "The Interrupted Journey," by John G. Fuller, who also wrote "Incident at Exeter" -- look, I don't know what The Truth about all this crap is, I'm just an ordiunary guy with a holiday condo on Planet Vleeptron in the Dwingeloo-2 Galaxy, but it just may possibly be that I'm meandering through a region of Planet Earth that Alien Sentients love to visit, I guess to see the forest blaze into color every September, and then they stop at a diner and have the Indian Pudding or the Pumpkin Pie, and pour maple syrup on their pancakes.

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