Didn’t Know Google Knew Roads Like This

The girlfriend and I were driving yesterday from White River Junction, Vermont to Burlington, and is par for the course for us, we consulted the GoogleMaps application on her Blackberry for directions. To our pleasant surprise, Google actually suggested a route consisting of small highways and county roads rather than the few major interstates that criss-cross Vermont. Like most people, we’re always torn between the faster highways and the more interesting/scenic byways, so we were glad to see that latter actually seemed to be the faster and more efficient route in this case.

Quick aside regarding White River Junction, which you probably haven’t heard of: it’s a small town just over the Vermont/New Hampshire border, near Dartmouth College. Hanover, New Hampshire, the town in which Dartmouth is actually located, was surprisingly boring. There were about two “downtown” blocks of shops, mostly chain stores and clothing retailers, with a few bland-looking restaurants and one pretty good independent bookstore (the official Dartmouth bookstore, like that of most major universities, is operated by Barnes and Noble).

White River Junction, on the other hand, was surprisingly charming, if quite small. The town is built around an old but still operating railroad station. The buildings immediately surrounding the station are mostly vacant, though still bearing the signs of coffee shops and ice cream stores gone by. One old warehouse is now home to a salvage depot, where a wide array of furniture and other building/decorating materials, antique and otherwise, lie totally unrestored, waiting to be discovered by a canny contractor or entrepreneurial interior decorator. We passed an enjoyable hour wandering through rows of crumbling columns, brass fixtures, hardwood school desks, and dusty armoires.

Believe it or not, the economic engine of the town seems to be the Center for Cartoon Studies, which is exactly what it sounds like: a school for cartoonists and graphic novelists, who who were both the employees and the primary customers of a nearby coffee shop.

A small gallery there, free and open to the public, featured material from R. Sakoryak’s Masterpiece Comics. This graphic novels renders such literary classics as “Crime and Punishment”, “Wuthering Heights”, and “The Scarlet Letter” in the style of comic classics like “Ziggy”, “Batman”, and even “Beavis and Butthead”.

Having had our fill of porch posts and picture books, we departed for Burlington via our backroads route. There were a lot of turns, but that’s par for the course on a rural route in New England. That is to say, “Route 5” is actually a route, not a road, and may in fact be comprised of quite a few different roads.

It truly was a picturesque drive, everything you could hope for from “the scenic route”. We’re cruising along, enjoying the scenery, when I happen to note that we’re no longer on the proper path. No problem, except that neither of us noticed a remotely significant diverging road in the last few minutes. We U-turn and retrace our steps to the intersection where we were supposed to turn off and realize why it hadn’t jumped out at us: the road was labeled simply “County Road” and was unpaved, consisting mostly of dirt plus some lingering mud from the recent rains.

GoogleMaps has been our constant companion on the road for months now, and it’s never tried to put us on a “road” like this. I double-checked, but there was no doubting it: this was the route GoogleMaps had found for us. We were miles from the interstate now, and it looked like there was at most 5.5 miles of unpaved road before the next state road (we had to guess from the names, but we were pretty confident that VT-110 would be paved). Besides, our Subaru Forrester does have four-wheel drive, even if it isn’t equipped with mud tires.

So along we went on our merry way, slip-sliding across the muddy street. For the most part, it wasn’t really dangerous. The worst we could have done was slide into a tree at 5 MPH or get stuck in a rut. Still, I didn’t relish the thought of getting towed out of a ditch by a bushy-bearded Vermonter casting stoic, scornful gazes at our Massachusetts license plates and our Blackberry.

To make a long story short, we managed the 5.5 miles without incident, though we did pass two such Vermonters. Both drove pick-up trucks, and one was pulled over on the side of the road, using a chainsaw to cut up a fallen tree for firewood. I’ve permitted my own beard to achieve record scraggliness, but I still felt stirrings of inadequacy as I gazed upon their bristly chins.

We also passed several other staples of the rural Vermont economy, including an alpaca farm, bark buckets collecting maple sap, and a hand-made sign advertising fresh eggs, $2 a dozen- a particularly substantial increase over supermarket prices considering the customer must first navigate several miles of dirt road to find the farmer.

At last we made it to VT-110 and felt pavement’s comforting, gravelly embrace. Ten miles later, GoogleMaps again attempted to steer us onto a mud puddle masquerading as a road. This time, we pulled over, dug out a paper map, and plotted the route to the nearest interstate. As we put away the Blackberry, my girlfriend noticed that we’d asked GoogleMaps for walking, rather than driving, directions.