Woke up at six local time (three a.m. internal) and showered. Went back to sleep on on leather couch until nine. Reawake, breakfast, out to the car.

First time I get to see Milton in the light. The houses are all large, and old. The land isn't clearnly divided into squares and the roads are twisty and sidewalkless. It's more near-rural suburbs than it is Laurelhurst, like I thought in the dark. For one, it's dirtier. The side of the road is littered with trash. 82nd isn't this littered.

One major difference is bumper stickers. In Portland, displaying your ideological allegiance by covering the back of your car in stickers is a normal thing. Most people have at least a yellow magnetic ribbon claiming support for that strangely defined group of people, The Troops. Here the only yellow ribbon I've seen was a gigantic one adorning the side of a warehouse.

Dunkin' Donuts is the chief franchise here. Their coffee is not terrible, and has an inventive top. The cups are also styrofoam, which you could never get away with in Portland.

We pass out of Massachussets through Rhode Island (Providence is beautiful and gone in five minutes) and into Conneticut within an hour. Being from a coast where there's only three states, this is fairly disorienting.

There are signs for Tim Hortons. I thought they only existed in Canada.

Red brick buildings are status quo. I automatically associate them with schools, only to realize they're warehouses or office buildings. There are also about as many steeples per square mile as Vatican City. I'm not sure if they're all still churches, or just the buildings left over from the innumerable Christian sects of one the 'Great Awakenings'.

New London, where we catch the ferry, is a beautiful little New England town. I get a brief feel of what H.P. Lovecraft was thinking of from it - make the fog darker and more oppressive, replace the normal New Englanders with hideous fish people, add some Great Depression decay, and you have Innsmouth. On the hills opposite of where we are there's a giant grey stone tower. It looks like a very old lighthouse, but David doesn't think it is from the placement and design. It reminds me of the monasteries built by Irish monks with their stone beehive houses.

Riding the ferry is something I could do every day. The winds are intense, but much warmer than I expected. It's comfortable and uncrowded, and car alarms don't go off too frequently. The view of the country from boat is wonderful. There's a little square fort built in the middle of the water, for some unknown purpose. David's iPhone camera lacks a zoom, so we'll get a shot of it with my crappy old digital on the return trip.

This cuts about 200 miles off the drive, and is a vastly superior way to spend it. Maybe once global warming raises the waters on the West Coast we'll get more ferries.

There's some ancient arcade machines on the ferry. Pac-Man, from the sound of it.

I'm surprised at the lack of displacement I'm feeling. It has't quite hit me that Portland and all the other people I know are about three thousand miles away.

The people making the sandwiches downstairs are a very intense looking black guy and a European woman with short hair. Despite there being no one else at the counter, they seemed fairly frantic about getting us sandwiches.

Since the second plane flight I've found that something about travelling makes me desire ginger ale, which is usually a drink of last resort for me.

The iPhones still get internet access out in the middle of the water. I look forward to our brave new transhuman future.

The New York Times has adopted the standard newspaper size of twelve inches. According to Martin, this reduces it to exactly twelve inches of credibility.

So far I'm the only guy with a fedora in New England. In fact, the only other fedora-wearers were a pair of Orthodox Jews at San Francisco Int'l. This isn't that unusual.

What is unusual to me is that I'm the only man with long hair I've yet seen. Martin's is a bit shaggy, bordering in mulletism, but doesn't really count. I wonder if it's commonality is another West Coast (or Northwest in particular) thing.

The Bratz movie is at the bottom of the revenue list in the papers, giving me some hope for humanity. Stll, it's on the revenue list, dampening that hope a bit.

It feels so very wrong to throw a can into the normal trash.

Saw a worker on the ferry with long hair, nose ring, and tattoos. Finally, someone normal.

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