I’ve mentioned before that one of the best parts of going away is coming home and realizing it’s just as nifty here as anyplace. Usually I’m driving home from points south — Manchester or Boston — and there is a part of the trip where I come around a corner and all of Vermont is just laid out in front of me all hilly and empty and I get a little giddy knowing that it’s my life and not my vacation. Anyhow, it was Summer when I left and Autumn when I came back and the usually green hills were going a little golden and all the way to reds and oranges by the time I got back. My inbox was full of people coming to visit and the lawn needs raking not mowing at the moment.

The rest of the trip was just grand. I put up my Nova Scotia photoset on Flickr which includes a few more shots of the caboose, many more photos of Kate (I have pix of her, she has pix of me) and some more librarians. I wrapped up my trip with a few talks in New Hampshire and got home late last night. You can also read the “What I did on my work vacation” part of the story if you’re interested in that.

I think my favorite parts of the trip were just lazily driving around Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton in a sort of aimless way. Nova Scotia has these “trail” systems where you can follow a scenic travelway that has a specific theme and you can download maps, learn more, etc. As we got further north the language of the radio stations changed from English to French and finally to Gaelic. When we stopped in Baddeck — home to the first British Flight by a British Subject — there was a wedding going on. So, all of our travels through town, to the wool festival, to the public library, to the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, were accompanied by bagpipe music. It just seemed like that was the way Cape Breton was supposed, to be, you know? Between that and the huge preponderance of redheads I find myself wanting to go back and I’ve only just left.