You’ve all seen this bridge before. It’s the Justice Harlan Fiske Bridge and it straddles the border between New Hampshire and Vermont near the town of Brattleboro.

I passed this way before in September 2014 and here I am again. This is how far I’ve travelled this morning, and I’m a long way from finishing my journey.

I was given a hot tip about a place down here called “Truck Camper World” in West Chesterfield – the largest selection of slide-in truck campers anywhere in New England. And I’ve driven 140 miles to come here through some of the hottest temperatures that I’ve encountered, and the place is closed on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. As I have said before … "and you’ll say again" – ed … people complain about a recession, and yet they just don’t want to do business.

Not only that, From what I could see of the collection of about 60 truck campers here, there isn’t one that would fit on Strider.

But although it’s been a totally fruitless (and expensive) day, it’s not been entirely wasted. When I was in Newfoundland last year I saw a truck cap that had “camper conversion” written all over it and I reckoned that I could make a neat little camper out of that. And as it so happens, the main agents in New England for the manufacturer were right next door to last night’s motel. Delivery time is 2 weeks apparently, and they are not as expensive as I was expecting them to be.

The problem with this though it that it ties up the pick-up. With a slide-in camper, it’ll slide out again so that you can use the pick-up for other things. With this set-up, you can’t. But how important is that likely to be?

There is another option, but that’s going to work out to be very expensive. That is to go back to somewhere that I visited yesterday who were the agents for a cheap constructor, and have one built for next spring.

Not only that, on one slide-in that I saw, there was a ticket for NATCOA – the North American Truck Camper Owners Association. They have a “classified ads” section on their website and so I’ve joined the club and placed an “wanted” advert.

But my drive out was not without excitement and interest. Once I had driven into the mountain the views were totally stunning.

While this one, not too far after the town of Peterboro, is not the best of the views, it’s the only one that would really lend itself to any kind of photographic exposure. You’ll just have to come to visit this area for yourself.

And I’m not at all sure of what this place might be.

Well, I am. It’s a banqueting and conference centre at the roadside. But never mind that for a moment – I’m far more interested in what it might have been. It looks like a Norman church tower with Tudor extensions and so it was probably the home of an eccentric American millionaire industrialist with delusions of grandeur, although I’m probably completely wrong about that.

But after my disappointments of today I headed north up Highway 195 seeing as how I was in the vicinity and there are a couple of places right at the top of New Hampshire and Vermont. And here I had a load of fun.

The speed limit on I95 is 65mph, which is about 105kph, and which is what I had Strider’s cruise control fixed to. Some Quebecois lorry driver had his speed limiter set at about 106kph so he was faster than me (by 1kph) and so he went to overtake me. That’s fine in a downhill bit, although he’ll take 10 minutes to pass me, but going uphill, I have the legs on him as his weight and gear-changing slows him down. And so for about half an hour this clown was out there blocking the outside lane, determined to pass me, much to the annoyance of everyone else on the Highway (it’s a two-lane road).

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … he finally made it past, just as we hit an uphill section. And he cut right in, nearly taking the bonnet off Strider, and then slowed dramatically. And there was nothing that I could do about that as a whole stream of cars was passing in the outside lane.

But not to be outdone. Strider can move when he has to and so in a fit of bad humour I made it back in front of the lorry, boxed him in with all of the traffic in the outside lane, and simply brought him to a standstill. And then I cleared off. He’ll be the rest of the night trying to get started again and dragging his load up that hill.

But I wasn’t standing for any of that nonsense. I could have been killed by that moron had my reactions been slower

So having calmed down (a little) I’m now in a motel in the town of Wells River on the border between New Hampshire and Vermont.

It’s a beautiful little place, even though it’s a tourist trap and everything (including the motel and the restaurant) is overpriced, but it does have several claims to fame, the most important of which is that at the last demographic survey there were 100 females for every 77.8 males.

This kind of thing is important to me because I can still chase after the women at my age, even if I can’t remember why.