Day 1 – New England, here I come

Murder She Wrote was my favorite TV series during my teenage years. How Jessica Fletcher solved murders in her own village, but also far beyond, was the basis of my lifelong love for detective series. No mystery was too complicated and nothing escaped her trained brain and female intuition. Even though she traveled around the world, I especially liked seeing her at work in her own village, the fictional Cabot Cove in Maine, but that had more to do with the decorum. I fell immediately in love with that village. It only had a few thousand inhabitants and it was the place where everyone apparently knew everyone. Cabot Cove had a typical colorful village center with cute shops to do your shopping, a post office that was more than just the place to buy stamps, because it turned out to be the place where the latest gossip and news were gathered and, above all, it had a white wooden church with a high spire tower. Everything was within walking or cycling distance. The houses were built in my beloved New England style, in colored wood, ranging from white to red and blue and all colors in between. Each house was finished with a romantic veranda and a front garden closed  off with a white fence. A small village where you could stroll to the harbor where fishing boats moored with the loot of the night and in the case of Maine that meant mainly lobster. And it was strategically well located close to Boston and New York, two amazing big cities. Great was my surprise years later, when I actually ended up in Cabot Cove ... in Universal Studios. My favorite town turned out to be no more than a set in a film studio in LA. But reality always surpasses fiction. Cabot Cove may have been a film set, but it was based on the beautiful villages of New England. It was New England that fueled my love for the country and not so much the national parks in the west. In my romantic fantasies I already saw myself living there. But life doesn't always bring what you want, and when I had the chance to move to the US temporarily, the metropolis of San Francisco and rural Ohio were also fun. Now that Murder She Wrote's retransmissions are bringing me in a nostalgic mood, it is high time to visit this beautiful and perhaps less well-known part of the US. And to top it all off, I am traveling at the end of September during what will hopefully be a beautiful Indian Summer.