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.