Following Our Noses

The plans for our trip called for us to leave Maine and head straight west to a small town called Speculator in the middle of the Adirondacks to spend our next 7 or so days. However as it were, that’s not at all how our trip transpired. It began with a conversation with a waiter who, upon finding out we were about to drive west with the eventual destination of Rochester, told us we must at least drive through White Mountains on our way. His description and enthusiasm left Cels and I knowing it was a place we couldn’t miss.

So we headed off in search of the towering and majestic view of the White Mountains. However instead of being greeted with crisp blue skies and white-capped peaks, low cloud cover, flood warnings and rain welcomed us. As you can imagine that initially bummed us out, until we started hiking. We couldn’t miss. Every hike we took lead us to bigger, taller and louder water falls. Soon our quick drive through had turned into a two-day waterfall extravaganza.

We got back on the road and again set our sites on Speculator. However, in the Vermont welcome center we realized something: we were only about an hour detour from Ben and Jerry’s. We couldn’t miss an ice cream tour could we? Little did we know the commitment to tours we had made when we decided to head out of our way to get ice cream. Suddenly signs popped up everywhere for different tours. We took a tour of a maple sugar farm and for about 20 minutes pondered the possibility of becoming sugar farmers (well at least I did!). We toured an apple cider farm, a cheese factory, a chocolate annex, and finally Ben and Jerry’s. Before it was done our hour detour for ice cream had turned into a daylong festival of samples.

By now we had used 3 of our 7 days for Speculator and we hadn’t even made it yet, but we didn’t care because our dreams were full of waterfalls and maple sugar. When we finally arrived in Speculator we pulled into town and went straight for the visitor center. As a side note it’s worth mentioning that I chose Speculator without having ever been or knowing someone who had been because it claimed to be year round outdoor adventure. Instead we arrived to find everything closed. No campsites were open. Even the visitor center told us that things really don’t open up around there for another couple of weeks. We were welcome to hike but with the amount of rain they had most of the trails were impassably wet (a fact we then verified on a pair of hikes).

At the time it felt like a giant disappointment. But looking back now, we never would have made our next discovery without it, and our next discovery may well end up being our best discovery of the trip.