On to Boston (8/30/2015)

I guess last night was my turn not to sleep well.  I finally gave it up about 6:00 a.m. and was going to work on the blog first thing, but as I was locating the camera I noticed the sunrise, so I threw on some clothes and back to the beach I went.  It was actually lighter than these pictures appear.

 

I thought I would be the first person on the beach, but there were several already out, gathering all the "good" stuff.  One group had found several sand dollars and a starfish!

My "haul" included 2 more pieces of seaglass and 2 shovels.  You just never know what you're going to find!

 

I figure those shovels might come in handy when we get back to Florida!

We had a quick breakfast, de-camped and got underway at 9:10, leaving our beautiful beach campground behind.  This state park beach was a real treasure.   I read somewhere that this is the only state park in New Hampshire that is right on the beach, so we lucked out on this since we just dumbed onto it.

We didn't think we had much of a drive to make this morning, but I made it a little more complicated by directing us to the wrong state park.  I had checked on two of them, one had electric at the sites and the other didn't.  Somehow I got that screwed up in my head and routed us to the one without.  We fueled just before we got to that turnoff, and I turned on Lucille and saw that we were 31 miles away.  Since the one we were headed for was only about a mile away, I checked my campground book where I had made by notes and guessed that I had picked out the wrong one.  Had we turned on Lucille earlier, we would have caught it but we figured she would send us on the freeway and we were trying to stick to secondary roads so we hadn't been using her.  Anyhow, we righted ourselves and got to the correct campground by 11:50, so we didn't lose much time, just took some different roads.

We crossed a bridge somewhere on our drive and the warning siren went off just as we crossed it, about gave us a heart attack.  Joe could see in the rear view mirror that the stoplight on the bridge had come on, so we quickly figured out what it was.  The drawbridge was going up!   But that was something new for us.

We saw gas prices from $2.65 down to $2.19.  Fortunately, we waited and bought it for the $2.19 price.

We went into the tunnel under the Boston Harbor, then crossed the bridge over the Charles River.  That bridge is a "cable-stayed" bridge, quite impressive.  "The tunnel is 8,448 feet (2,575 m) long, of which approximately 3,960 feet (1,210 m) are underwater."

TUNNEL UNDER BOSTON HARBOR

 We managed to find our campground, which is sort of in the boonies, in the Boston suburb of Hingham.  It is very woodsy, not crowded at all.

We are tucked in to a campsite again, amongst the trees, I'll have to get a photo tomorrow.

We rested for a while (I took a nap), then we went out to find the ferry, which our campground "host" recommended as our best way to get back into Boston.  Although the address they gave us wasn't exactly right, we managed to find the ticket office and the guy in there was very helpful with information, so we hope to be set for tomorrow.  Then we found a Walmart to pick up a few things (ran out of coffee!!), and stopped at "Margurita's" Mexican restaurant for dinner.  By the time we got back to the campground it was dark.

The 6-wheel bike we saw the other day is a "conference bike" or "CoBi."   "The ConferenceBike is a 7-seat human powered vehicle created by artist Eric Staller and manufactured in Santa Cruz, California, USA by conferencebike.com and in Germany by Velo.Saliko. One person steers and all may pedal.  The bike has a circular jointed drive-shaft and rack & pinion steering. In most countries it has the same legal status as a bicycle. There are now 300 ConferenceBikes in 18 countries."

What was really interesting is that they are using these bikes as "icebreakers" at, among other things, universities, and Vincennes University was named as one of the few!  Small world.



"They have been used for fund-raising events and by biking advocacy groups worldwide. CoBies are being used to transport employees on the Google campus in California; and as ice-breakers at Vincennes, Stony Brook and Alfred Universities. Every group you can think of can use a ‘CoBi’ as a TOOL and a SYMBOL for bringing people together."

On another subject, I think I killed my phone today.  I apparently dropped it when we left for the ferry, and when I went looking for it, in the dark, when we got home, it was under the car.  Now I can't get it to come on, although it rang when Joe was calling me to help me find it, so we think we might have run over it with the car.  So we'll see what tomorrow brings with that.  All in all, I haven't had a great day today, so I'm thinking I might as well just go to bed.  Maybe my phone will heal itself overnight, and we just ordered tickets for a 2-day trolley tour in Boston, so hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.




  

Hampton Beach (8/29/2015)

We made it through the night with no electricity (no air conditioning), but it is quite cool here on the beach, 64 when I woke up this morning.  Joe said he didn't sleep too well, kept waking up without his sleep machine, so he should have brought in the extension cord and plugged it in to the invertor.  If we stay here another night, he will need to do that.

He got up pretty early though, and we walked down to the beach about 7:45.  There were just a few other people down the beach a ways.  The water was chilly, but it was lovely.  Joe thought this bucket was very beachy.

We walked the beach for an hour, gathering rocks and "stuff.  Joe found a big piece of brown seaglass, and I found a little piece, and another piece that might be a pebble.

I also picked up a couple of other "stuff" -- unidentifiable.

The sand was soft and silky, but one area had interesting ripples.

By the time we left the beach, Joe had decided we really needed to spend another day here.  He wanted a beach day!  As we walked back through the almost-empty parking lot, we saw where all the birds rested -- Andrew would have a heyday here.

That was our first hour.  The next hour we spent looking for Joe's soda.  This is a very beachy town, no parking places, lots of little shops.  Fountain sodas are a rarity here.  We finally found a McDonalds, with no parking, so he circled the block while I ran in and got us some breakfast sandwiches and sodas.  In the midst of our travels, though, we did get to see the bridge come up.

We got back to the RV, stopped by and paid for another night, did a little housekeeping, read for a bit, got on the computer.   I fixed us lunch, and made some of our Jiffy Mix brownies during our 11-1 generator time, then we headed to the beach again, this time prepared to get wet.  We've seen a variety of beach "buggies" here and thought our versatile little laundry cart might work, so Joe loaded it up and off we went.

 When he hit the heavy sand, he turned it around and pulled it.  I looked over someone else's buggy, and all we need is bigger wheels on ours.

We spent another hour or so here.  The beach was a lot more crowded than it had been at 7:45 this morning.

But there's always room for more.  We worked our way out in the water to about thigh-high (over a period of time), but one wave wiped me out and I pretty well got everything below the neck wet.  After we got used to the water though, it was very refreshing.  And the cold water didn't seem to bother the little kids at all.

LIFE IS GOOD

We watched a boat pulling parasailers the whole time we were on the beach, and Joe finally convinced me that we should do this, but when we got back to the RV and I called, they were booked up until tomorrow at 4:00 p.m., and we will be in Boston by then.  Since it cost $89 each, it was probably just as well.

We decided we should take advantage of our "down" day (which was pretty busy) and get the laundry caught back up.  We had seen at least two laundramats in our drive this morning, so that was the next item on the agenda.  When we finished that, we spent another hour or so trying to find something to eat -- someplace with a parking lot, a sit-down restaurant, that had something other than seafood.  We ended up with a pizza over in Salisbury, Massachusetts (just down the road another few miles).  Finally, we finished our day, got the clean laundry put away, Joe re-caulked the bathtub, hooked up his extension cord to his sleep machine, and we went to bed.  A nice day in New Hampshire.

Into New Hampshire (8/28/2015)

As we worked on de-camping this morning, Joe ran into a problem.  Apparently, one of those bumps we hit lately was hard enough to dislodge the water tank from the slot it resides in, and it bounced out and  was now resting on top of the bracket, instead of inside of it.  Fortunately, while Joe was filling up the water tank, he checked to see how close it was to full, and he noticed it wasn't sitting level.  So, handyman Joe went to work.

He had to do a little bending, but he got it back together and it seems to be fine.  Just delayed us a little, so it was 9:45 before we headed out.  We were off and on the freeway and turnpike, and Highway 1, all day.  We don't like turnpikes so set Lucille to "avoid" them, which added in a few more turns.  That, along with missed roads, kept us busy.  But we only paid $7 in tolls so that wasn't too bad. 

We drove past a real "blueberry hill" this morning.  There was a tractor out there "picking" and we could see buckets set around. 

Also, there was one guy out picking, and he had some kind of "scoop" so he didn't have to pick each berry separately.  Joe, of course, was intrigued by this and now we need to stop at a hardware store so he can check it out.

We cross lots of bridges along this coastline, some rather interesting. 

We kicked around the idea of driving into Boston or stopping off before we got there.  We drove through some famous areas today, including Kennebunkport, Maine, famous for the George W. Bush summer compound.  We didn't drive around looking for anything here, but I did recognize the name.

When we saw that today's travels would put us in Boston on Friday night around rushhour, we opted for a state park right on the beach in New Hampshire.  We crossed the state line into New Hampshire at 3:35.  As we drove through town, we came upon this new kind of "bicycle" that we had never seen before.  It looked like six seats in a circle, all pedaling, but going in one direction.  I hope we get a better look at one here in town.  I tried to research it but couldn't come up with a name for it that would bring up any information.

Our Lucille directions took us to the State Beach, but not the State Park, so that required another phone call.  But we ended up right on the beach, maybe 600 feet from the water with just a parking area and sand dune separating us.  Very pretty, and the weather is perfect.  We got set up (no hook-ups because we are in over-flow, so that didn't take long), and Joe decided this was the night for his lobster, so we drove on down through this beach town and into the next.  Our campground "host" had given us two recommendations right across the street from each other - Browns and Markey's.  Both parking lots were full, with people lined up out the door.  We parked at Browns and ended up walking across the street to Markey's (Markey's Lobster Pool, Seabrook, NH).  There was quite a system involved.  You gave your order for lobster at one counter  (lobsters, corn on cob), at another counter, steamers (muscles, clams, oysters) and fried food at another counter (crabs, fries, hamburgers, fried fish, etc.)  You got a number for each order, and when they called your number, you got your food and found a table.  The place was packed, and everyone except us seemed to know what they were doing.  Joe told them what size lobster (medium) and that he wanted a cute one.  He added that if he couldn't get the meat out of it, he would be back to get help.  I ordered a cheesburger.  I wasn't sure they didn't cook the corn in the same water as the lobsters, so I wasn't even brave enough to try that.  It was a bit smelly in here, but Joe got his lobster disseminated and enjoyed the meat.  He said it was good, not great.  Personally, I was glad to get out of here and find some fresh air!

As I said, we don't have any hook-ups at our campground.  We can only run the generator between 7-9 a.m., 11-1, and 5-7 p.m., so we didn't get all of our electronic gadgets charged up.  We will have to manage that better in the morning.  And decide whether we are staying another day or moving on to Boston.

We drove 224 miles today, finished up with Maine, and get to color in another state on the map (if we had one to color).  We have never been in any of these eastern states before so we are really enjoying getting to explore this part of the U.S.


  Markey's Lobster Pool, Seabrook, NH. 

Acadia Nat'l Park/Bar Harbor (8/28/2015)

Today was our day to "do" Bar Harbor, Maine, a town I've read about in many books.  The Acadia National Park sort of surrounds Bar Harbor, as well as covering an area at the tip of the inlet just north of the island that Bar Harbor is on.  I woke up early and got some pictures of the lobster boats going out right beside our campsite. 

It was supposed to have gotten down in the 50s last night, but the cloud cover must have kept us a little warmer.  It was 64 when I got up before 6:00 (not adjusted to new time zone yet).  I coaxed Joe out of bed early too, so we got a good start on our busy day.  I checked phone messages just before we got ready to go out the door and found out that we did have to move to a different campsite, so we pulled up stakes and drove up by the office to our new campsite (and away from the water), got reestablished and took off for Winter Harbor, the Schoodic Peninsula, Prospect Harbor and Corea.  Since I didn't have anything to fix for breakfast (I had boiled the rest of my eggs to cross the border (probably unnecessarily), and we had run out of cereal and bagels, we opted to find breakfast on the way.  We found a place in Winter Harbor so we got that taken care of, then headed on our drove to Schoodic Peninsula, where we spent the next hour or so clambering over rocks on this breath-takingly beautiful rocky coast. 

The water was freezing!!!  But it was all very beautiful, and the slabs of rocks made you want to just keep walking over to the next viewpoint.

We even investigated some tidal pools in honor of Bridgette and John.

I finally drug Joe off these rocks (actually, I couldn't see him any more and figured he had fallen between the rocks and broken something, but he was fine and eventually worked his way back to the car).  And we continued on our drive around this part of the Acadia National Park. We passed some scuba divers taking lessons in the shallow water.  I don't know how thick their wetsuits were, but I hope they were pretty warm because that water was really cold.  I read on one of the placards that the water temperature was in the 50s, I'm not sure if that was year-round, but I would have guessed it was 32, (freezing)!

As we came around the point and exited the Park, we came upon the tiny harbor of Wonsqueak Harbor, a picture of which is on a cup I purchased later.  And we passed lots of lobster traps -- we couldn't figure out why they weren't all in the water because the sea was just dotted with different colored buoys marking either lobster traps or crab traps.

.  Joe pulled into a gas station looking for his soda -- not luck, but I did get a photo of "Lobster Joe" here.

"Prospect Harbor is home to the last sardine cannery in the U.S., signified by the iconic "Stinson Man" sign.  The factory is being reborn as a lobster processing facility."  No surprise.

Next up was the Village of Corea.  We drove to this one little wharf that was just loaded down with lobster paraphenalia.  Lobster is big business in this area.

Along the road we found two interesting sights -- a very attractive, wooden woodpecker stuck on a telephone pole, and a huge bird nest, either an eagle or osprey.

We had driven back over to Winter Harbor and picked up a few items at the IGA store, so we stopped back by the RV and dropped them off, paid for another night here, then headed to Bar Harbor.  Along the highway we spotted a little flock of wild turkeys.

The town of Bar Harbor was really hopping when we got there.  Cars lined every street, traffic was barely moving.  We lucked out and found a parking spot right across from a Mexican restaurant, so we had our Mexican fix, then walked through the shops for a little bit.  Then we headed out to drive the Park.  We missed a road to the Sand Beach, and ended up on the one-way loop road for about 10 miles before we could get headed back in the right direction.  Pretty views all along the way.

  We then stopped at the Visitor Center (52 steps), got a parking pass (free with our American the Beautiful cards), and headed to the beach with all of our "stuff" (lawn chairs, binoculars, camera).

Kites are popular along this windy coast, and there were a couple of pretty ones flying here.

Reluctantly, we left the beach.  However, I found a treasure just before I got to the steps -- a piece of authentic sea rope, and 2 little pieces of driftwood.

We continued on our loop drive (again) and went up to the top of Cadillac Mountain, which is only 1,530 feet, but since it is right on the coast, it provides a lovely 360 degree viewpoint of the Atlantic Ocean, the town of Bar Harbor, and lots of little islands.

Joe took a couple of panorama shots up here too.

Picture-postcard-perfect.

And then the camera battery died (and I forgot to charge the extra) so that was the end of the pictures for the day.  We headed out of the Park, stopped for pizza in Ellsworth (I was too tired to mess with cooking or cleaning up), and got back to came about 8:30, worn out from a very good day.  The weather was perfect, sunny, probably in the low 70s but crisp from the sea air.  We will now have a vision of Bar Harbor when we hear anything about this area in the future. 

Side note back to St. John, Joe thinks our "river otters" may have been seals.  He read a sign at the Tidal Falls yesterday that there were seals in the area and they were not close enough for us to see very well, so one or the other.