Vermont, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Hampshire...

The weather had cleared a little so we decided that we should re-trace part of our route through the White Mountains, back in New Hampshire, because even though it was raining and dreary on our first pass through, we wanted to try our luck at seeing them under better weather circumstances.

It doesn’t take long to get where you’re going in Vermont or New Hampshire so, stopping and walking around Woodstock, Vermont, which is another beautiful historic town with lots of classic architecture, we were back in New Hampshire by early afternoon.

Pictured are a couple of typical places in Woodstock.









Just before we crossed into New Hampshire we drove through Rutland where we saw the Dalhousie University football team run a couple of plays. The highway zigzagged back and forth between the two states, eventually spitting us out at Woodsville, New Hampshire, where we settled in for the night at Wal-Mart and watched the last of the ten movies we’d bought back in Manitoba - Superman 3, which was almost unbearable, but it was all we had.

This area of New England has produced a lot of famous people. I know we’re just touching on it because, just in the towns we’ve passed in the last few hours on the highway, we’ve seen the hometowns of Ansel Adams, Norman Rockwell, Calvin Coolidge and Robert Frost. Henry David Thoreau walked the same trails we bicycled today at Franconia Notch State Park, in the White Mountains, where we‘re camped. There are only seven camping spots available, with Echo Lake right beside us and Cannon Ski Hill, which looks something like Sun Peaks, towering over us.

Earlier in the day we had driven to Bath, where we met Mike, the owner of the oldest continuously operating general store in America. Next door he also has the At The Hop ice cream shop, mostly dedicated to his band, Rocking Chair, but full of interesting and collectable rock n’ roll memorabilia. Mike’s a drummer and his band just returned from a tour in England. I think they do a lot of Beatles stuff.

Pictured are the oldest general store in America, with Mike walking by and, inside the ice cream shop. Also at Bath is the longest covered bridge in New Hampshire, which is somewhat of an architectural marvel - the dual arches have something to do with it.











We got to Franconia Notch State Park in the early afternoon and got out the bikes because there is an eight-mile long walk/bike trail that follows the Pemigewasett River - which translates into fast running water. It’s a great trail, if steep at times, that took us by some truly amazing locations. Franconia is an excellent vacation area for outdoors oriented people.

Pictured are: A fly fisherman on the Pemigewasset River at Franconia Notch Park as well as The Basin, formed by a glacier about 25,000 years ago and finessed by the river ever since. The Basin was much mused upon by Thoreau.










Later in the afternoon we drove back to Littleton where we had fries and coffees in the eighty-year-old Littleton Diner, famed for countless Gubernatorial and Presidential campaign ‘stump’ speeches.

We had planned on a campfire but the weather turned really ugly, with sheets of rain and high winds whipping down over the mountain. Luckily for us there were a couple of TV stations available.

The weather was the same in the morning so we passed time with me reading Memoirs of a Geisha and Janice cleaning the trailer, with Good Morning America running in the background. We waited until noon, at which time we pulled up camp and then, as soon as we were on the road, the weather cleared. We couldn’t have kept our campsite anyway because there were three major events going on in the area: The Scottish Games, a two-hundred mile in twenty-four hours run with thousands participating and a NASCAR race just outside the park.

Reluctantly, we left the White Mountains behind and headed south and ended up at the Tilton Wal-Mart.

We stopped at Concord, the capital of New Hampshire, for lunch and walked around downtown where we went to a farmer’s market and an art market before having lunch and then heading for Portsmouth.

Pictured is the State Capital Building at Concord.


We toured around Portsmouth by bike before looking for a campsite. Of course, Portsmouth is on the water and the price for camping reflected it. The first place we stopped was Libby’s Campsite where they wanted $85 per night, plus taxes. Instead, we crossed the boarder into Maine and drove to York Harbour, about ten miles up the road from Portsmouth, and checked into Dixon’s Coastal Campsite where we paid $38, plus tax, for the same thing. OK, so it wasn’t waterfront.

Pictured is the main intersection in downtown Portsmouth.






Today we’re going to figure out how we can camp somewhere near Boston so that, hopefully, we can take the Amtrak, from somewhere near our campsite, into the heart of the city.

Covered bridges, clear mountain streams and Dog Patch

We woke Saturday morning to bright blue cloudless skies and so decided on staying another day in Bethel. Because our site was reserved, we moved to another campsite closer to town and then rode our bikes around the river trails and the town. I’ve included a couple of pictures of the houses in Bethel just to illustrate their grand scale. I’m not sure of the history but you can see that most of the houses had the barns attached. Also one of the halls at the private high school, that they call academies, where rich kids are boarded away from home.






Later in the day Janice taught me to make ‘Tim’s’ World Famous Bean Dip which is one of my new favourite meals. It’s vegetarian. You mix half a can of black beans (put the other half in a baggy and freeze for next time) with an equal amount of cooked brown (or other) rice. Chop a whole tomato, about a third of a red onion, a whole avocado, a few tablespoons of salsa, and mix with the juice of a freshly squeezed lime. Spread this mixture on top of the heated beans/rice and grate some Cheddar or Jack cheese on top. Easy - and eaten by dipping Tostitos chips into the mixture. Try it. It comes with a money back guarantee.

After dinner we went to the local bar because there was live music there, but it turned out to be a solo guy who was good, but very unconventional and low key. He was playing an amplified acoustic guitar with fingerpicks and it sounded like… a piano? When we got home we watched a really funny movie called Heartbreakers. Unlike Canada, almost all private American campgrounds have cable. It must be a pretty old movie because it starred Gene Hackman and Sigourney Weaver.

We woke to a cloudy sky and decided to head for New Hampshire, which is only twenty miles from where we were staying in Bethel. The state motto for New Hampshire is Live Free or Die. At the first little town, Gorman, I saw two young people selling organic produce so we stopped and bought some organic herbs and they were nice enough to throw in a bunch of organic cherry tomatoes. The whole area here is the ski destination for the Eastern Seaboard although the mountains are pretty but puny by BC standards.

The next day we stopped at the first of the covered bridges we were to encounter, pictured below. The wooden structures below the roof apparently lasted more than twice as long once covered.



It rained pretty well all day and so we didn’t get to see much of the White Mountains that everybody has been telling us are so beautiful. If it had been a nice day we would have driven to the top of 6,000 foot Mount Washington, where you can apparently see as far as Boston on a good day. Rain or no, we did stay at our nicest campground so far, called Lost River Valley near Lincoln. It has huge trees, two nice streams running through the site, the Lost River on the other side of the highway where massive boulders separate clear, deep swimming holes and lots of trees with roots clinging to the huge single boulders beneath them. I’m not sure of the elevation of the campsite but we were right below the clouds.

We played Hangman that night and I beat the pants off Janice.

Pictured is our campsite at Lost River Valley with the ubiquitous glasses of wine that keep showing up everywhere we go. Note the tree clinging to the rock. Also, one of the streams running through the property.









By the time we drove through the White Mountains, we were almost in Vermont, so we crossed over, with the idea that we’d travel down the state and then cross back over lower New Hampshire to the coast again. The capital city of Vermont is a pretty little place called Montpellier. Don’t pronounce it the French way though because people will look at you funny. We walked all around the town before driving up the road a few miles to a campsite on the Onion River at Marshfield.

Pictured is the State House at Montpellier as well as an inside picture of it - I really liked the painting displayed. Lastly a pic typical of the architecture there.










At Marshfield we got a real taste of rural Vermont when we found ourselves to be the only tourists at the campsite we checked into. By the time we were set up we thought we were somewhere in the middle of something like The Trailer Park Boys meet Dog Patch. We crossed the bridge from the highway and pulled up to a sign that said ‘office’ but was at the top of a skinny dirt path leading to a deserted barn. A guy came out of the house next door so we inquired if he had a site for the night. He said, “Sure, take your pick.“ I couldn’t see the campsite from where we were but I asked if he had an AAA discount. He said, “Naw, we don’t bother with none a’ that stuff. It’s $25, cash.” I liked his style. I handed him the money and we were done. No unnecessary niceties.

There were actually a couple of riverfront lots available but once we started to set up, almost immediately a guy came wandering through who we could tell, after two words, was ‘Special’. We decided to move a little further away from the rest of the ’campers’. Soon we saw a number of dirty little kids in diapers running around a few equally disheveled women that had started to appear out of various shoddy looking trailers.

No sooner had had we finished setting up when a skinny little guy stuck his smiling head around the corner of the trailer announcing, “Hi, I’m John Evans, your official Ambassador to Vermont.” He was about fifty or so with a friendly, deeply creased face. His manner was friendly too, if a little skittish. He said he’d be happy to sell us some firewood and then started telling me about his previous life in the navy, and smoking marijuana with the Hopi in Arizona, and so on... He even invited us to have spaghetti with is wife and three kids. This all happened within five minutes.

We declined his spaghetti offer, but I was interested in how much pot smoking went on in the US military. He said when he was in the Navy pot smoking was commonplace. They would normally go inside the gun turrets on the ships but most everybody knew it was going on so it wasn‘t that big a deal. In the mid 80’s though, two guys crashed a jet onto the deck of an aircraft carrier and were found to have THC in their systems. Ronald Regan was very pissed and, according to John, it was that incident that started The War on Drugs, and dope testing in the military.

Apparently there was a huge exodus from The Services at that point. Either people finding a way to get discharged or being dishonorably discharged after testing positive. According to John it significantly depleted the ranks at that point.

Meanwhile, at Dog Patch, some guy that must have been having a nap, could be heard mumbling gruffly at a couple of little dogs, “Shut up or I’ll stuff my _ _ _ _ _ _ _ boot down your throat.” Well, the dogs must not have liked that because all of a sudden there was a big uproar with the dogs barking furiously and him shouting over them about what he was going to do to them. After that had quieted down we would hear him (everything he said was at the top of his lungs through a real gravel whiskey voice) to “Shut up!”, or “Get over here!”, or “How many times do I have to tell you!”. He was probably fifty-something and it turned out some of the dirty little kids in diapers were his. After a while it was quite comical because he’d constantly be shouting orders at the top of his lungs but all the kids, women and dogs simply went about what they were doing, completely ignoring him. Eventually I saw the campground owner’s truck at the site and, after that, there was no more noise.

We woke to blue skies and left Dog Patch behind to tour the Green Mountains. The sunshine didn’t last long so, once again, we weren’t getting to see much of the mountains. We did see the first hints of colour in the trees though. Passing through some really pretty little towns, we stopped at Middlesbury and took a walk around.
Pictured below are a downtown street and the falls in downtown Middlesbury, the former site of a a marble works and several different grain and gin mills that are now funky shops.





We stayed at Country Village campsite outside Leichestire where we were, once again, the only tourists. We had a ripping big campfire and I made a salad, chopping up just about everything that was in the crisper before Janice added bacon and scallops with a maple syrup/ horseradish dressing.

Super Wal-Marts, Bar Harbor, Belfast and Bethel...

We left Bangor in a slight drizzle. Dropping the trailer just across the river at the Brewer Wal-Mart, we drove to Bar Harbor, where it dawned on us that we’d touched on the tip of the iceberg of the really wealthy area of the US Eastern Seaboard - where the smell of old money mingles seamlessly with the sea breeze. Bar Harbor sits in a beautiful natural setting, graced by some of the most grand homes we’re ever likely to see. It’s also the epitome of the American tourist trap. By the time we got there the kids were already back in school but still, it was completely overrun by tourists with bulging shopping bags.

Pictured below are a view of Bar Harbor and Dink’s Taxi, located in a side alley of the shopping district at Bar Harbor.









From Bar Harbor it was a short circle tour around Acadia National Park but, unless you’re prepared to take a full day and take some hikes, about all you’ll see are tree lined roads with the odd glimpse of a lake or, if you’re lucky, the ocean.

Back at Brewer we walked some fast paced loops of the immense Wal-Mart parking lot. The Wal-Mart Super Stores here are open from six a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. Inside there’s space for four football fields, with complete grocery stores where you can buy a whole chicken for $3.99, liquor stores, take-out deli’s and lots of space dedicated to outdoor living products. Their parking lots cover forty or fifty acres where there are always a number of RV’s parked overnight as well a few transport trucks.

Janice discovered that these Super Wal-Marts have vending machines called Red Boxes that dispense current release DVD movies for $1. You swipe your credit card, choose your movie from the touch screen display, and the machine spits it out. If you keep the movie for more than twenty-four hours you’re charged $1 per day penalty, up to twenty-five days, at which time you own the movie. You can return the movie to any Red Box. This works out to be a great find for us because, Janice being Rhelda’s daughter, she has saved the earphones from previous airline flights, so we just make sure the laptop is charged, which we can do on the road via the cigarette lighter charger and,voila, we’re at the movies. Oh, and curried pork for dinner. Did I mention that we rarely eat hamburgers or hot dogs on this trip? If we ever decide to publish anything about these travels it would have to include Janice’s Road Recipes because I’m pretty positive that no other RVers eat as well or as varied a menu as we do.

The next day we headed for the coast again, touring Amsden and then Belfast, where, if it had been located in Canada we might have been sorely tempted to purchase an architectural marvel that had already been a coffee shop on one side with an art gallery on the other, in a killer location, on the main street overlooking the bay. It’s a triangular brick and stone building built in 1874 with fourteen foot stamped tin ceilings on the first floor and ten or twelve foot ceilings on the second floor, which is a residence. One wall in the coffee shop was also stamped tin and all of the fascinating architectural detailing was fully intact. Oops, just daydreaming…

Later the same day we had lunch and took a walking tour of the very picturesque but again, overrun, coastal town of Camden and then made brief stops at equally picturesque Rockland before heading inland to the state capital, Augusta.

Pictured are a view of Camden Harbor and another of Main Street Camden.









We knew that just down the road from Augusta in the town of Gardiner was the A-1 Diner, of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives fame. What we couldn’t find around Maine’s capital was a campground, so we opted for Wal-Mart once more where we dropped the trailer, found me some new Crocs (does anybody else find those things as comfortable and all-round useful as I do?) before taking the ten-minute drive to Gardiner. We could have gone to a jam at a club in Augusta but there were already four drummers in attendance and the Cajon would have been redundant, so we decided not to stay. Watched another $1 movie instead.

Pictured below is the A-1 Diner which has been in continuous operation for sixty-seven years, and our meals there. Janice had a blue cheese burger while I had spicy noodles with shrimp - really good. On the way back I snapped a picture of the State Capital Building from the highway because it’s in an odd location with nowhere to view the front of it but the highway.










The next day, heading west, with the idea of seeing some of New Hampshire and Vermont, we stopped at Bethel, Maine. Are there any towns that aren’t important relics of the past around here? This one has some of the largest historic houses that we’ve seen yet. Those of distant past lumber barons. One standout of Bethel is the grouping of six or seven immense brick buildings that look like a university campus but turn out to be a high school (Acadamy)where hundreds of high school kids are boarded out from their various rich families around the state. After setting up camp at Stonybrook on the Sunday River, we hiked to the top of Will Mountain, one of the northern tips of the Appalachians, where we were afforded excellent views of the surrounding territory. It being Friday, we visited two local bars to swap stories with the locals. Is it just me or are the stories pretty well weighted to what the Americans have to say?

Pictured is Janice hiking up Will Mountain, and a stump I found there that was sprouting itself a pair of kidneys.









Some of the best things about traveling in the US are: Gas is thirty cents, or more, cheaper per liter than in Canada while wine is never more than half the cost of what we’d pay at home for the same thing.

Maritime Musings and Excited States...

Pictured: One last beautiful sunset over the Saint John River and, Janice takes in the lull before the storm the night before Earl.



We woke to drizzling rain at Hartt Island Park knowing that we were on the edge of where Tropical Storm Earl was scheduled to appear. It started pouring rain about 10:30 am and we had to move our trailer at 11:00 because we hadn’t been sure if we were staying and so didn’t reserve our spot. I got thoroughly soaked and by noon it was coming down in sheets so we hunkered down, me with a book, Janice mostly on the internet, and waited while the wind blew and the puddles grew. By three 0’clock the skies opened up and we took a long walk along the river. Pictured below: Janice's pictures of some of the rain at our new, lower level campsite where the big puddle is forming. The truck(her name is Betty White by the way), gives an idea of the puddle's depth. By the time we got back from our walk on the river the kids at camp had put the puddle to good use.















The downpour gave us time to reminisce about our six-week tour of the Maritimes. We concluded that Newfoundland tops our list. Nova Scotia has more history and more grand seaside communities; Prince Edward Island is perhaps prettier; New Brunswick has the Acadian culture that is colourful and intriguing, but The Rock has a way of casting a spell. Its like being immersed in a different culture, almost like a different country, where the folks are both rugged and genuine, like the landscape that surrounds them. I know we’d go back.

We left Hartt Island Park on Sunday morning and drove into Fredericton where we parked downtown and walked around, had lunch and then widened our explorations on our bikes. It’s amazing what a little hurricane will do. A few days earlier when we were in Fredericton we had fled early because of the thirty-six degree heat that set a 130 year record. Two days later we were wearing jackets because it was only about fourteen degrees, with a chilly breeze - from record summer highs to fall in one day. We had dinner at Killarney Lake in Fredericton and then bedded down in the parking lot of the local Wal-Mart.

The next day, on our way to McAdam, NB, you’ll be thrilled to know that we drove through Harvey, the home of none other than the late Don Messer. We camped at Wauklehegan Lake at McAdam where we toured the old CP station pictured below and later finished off anything that we weren’t allowed to take across to the Excited States of America.



Pictured are the boathouses at Wauklehegan lake and Janice at the same lake.





Pictured is the CP Station built in 1900. The cafeteria was added in 1910 and everything is original except the countertops and flooring that were replaced in the 1950’s, and the stool tops that were replaced last year. We split a piece of homemade coconut cream pie with coffees for $5.00.






We crossed the border into the great state of Maine at the teensy little outpost east of our campsite and took the backroads through to Lincoln, where we had lunch and then camped at Pleasant Hill Campsite at Bangor. What they forgot to tell us at our campsite is the fact that we're parked right below the flyway to the Bangor International Airport. Pretty loud with the windows open. We unhooked and then drove into town and were soon filled in on the goings on by the bartender at The Sea Dog Brewery and Restaurant. The beer was very good and the bartender was well informed. Like BC, the main industry was forestry until twenty-five-or-so years ago but the regional hospital with the cancer unit is now the major employer. Tomorrow, on to the coast...

Woolastook, Nashwaak and Hurricane Earl…

Attempting to beat the heat, we set off early from Saint Andrews before stopping at Saint Stephens, which borders the state of Maine and was the subject of a W-5 program I saw a year or so ago. It was about Canadian kids smuggling crack cocaine into the small town of Calais, Maine, right across the river. The Americans were frustrated because Canada’s penalties were so lame and the problem was growing. I would guess they’re still struggling with the same issue but you sure couldn’t tell from looking at such a serene little town by day.
Pictured: Saint Andrews, NB with Calais, Maine across the river.








We had only made it an hour or so up the road when we saw a nice looking campsite at a place called, yes, Woolastook, on the Saint John River - which resembled a lake more than a river due to the hydro-electric dam which we discovered later. We spent most of the afternoon swimming off the wharf at our campsite at Woolastook, in what was pretty soupy-warm water. It was there that Janice re-learned, from her new nine-year-old girlfriends, how to do a forward summersault off the wharf.

Because we weren’t so fond of the overly warm water at Woolastook, we headed up the road to Hart Island Park on the same river, but past the dam, where the water wasn’t so warm. The campsite included a water park that was free to campers between ten and eleven a.m., so Janice also got to re-live a ten-year-old waterslide experience. The site also has a driving range, a bunch of basketball hoops, tennis courts and kayak and canoe rentals.
Pictured is Janice barreling down the waterslide like a speeding bullet. I wonder if the real Superwoman plugs her nose.






We walked around downtown Fredericton later in the morning. Because it’s a university town as well as the provincial capital, and situated alongside the Saint John River, it’s a scenic enough place. Abnormally but hellishly hot when we were there though. Returning to camp, overheated, we spent the next couple of hours swimming in the river and sitting in the shade reading. Because of the heat we probably dunked another four or five times throughout the afternoon and evening. There’s a province-wide campfire ban on but, for some reason our campsite allowed them, so we had a ripping fire overlooking the river while we counted sputniks.
Pictured is the Saint John River in front of our campsite at Hart Island Park.





The heat was still pretty oppressive when we got up but we rode our bikes along the river for a half hour or so before going for our first dunk of the day. Deciding to take an exploratory drive, trying to discover somewhere new to have lunch along the river, the only place we could find with adequate shade was under a bridge on the Nashwaak River.
Pictured below is Indiana Jones about to cross the Nashwaak River his own way.


Tomorrow we’re heading north in an effort to out-maneuver Hurricane Earl, and then on to Maine in the next few days…

A quarter way there....

As of today it's been three months and almost 20,000 kilometers since we left our driveway in Kamloops. Of course we're over budget again this month but we knew the first six months would be the most expensive, as we put on all the miles. Once we get south for the winter we'll be doing less travelling. Or so we keep rationalizing anyway.

Leaving Truro behind we camped at Glenhome, New Brunswick where there wasn’t much else besides a swimming pool. It was a hot, muggy day so it was nice to have the pool to ourselves, before it started to rain and cooled things off.

The next day we drove up to the Northumberland Shore and spent some time at beautiful and warm Heather and Tidnish beaches, before crossing into New Brunswick and checking into a campsite just outside Moncton where we had a roaring fire.

In the morning we drove to Hillsborough where Janice’s great grandparents were from, and wandered around their excellent and extensive train museum before heading for the Hopewell Rocks which are famous because, besides their immense size and ghastly shapes, they clearly demonstrate the disparity between the tides on the Bay of Fundy. We walked the park in the afternoon and caught the high tide, which is pictured below.


The next day we got up early in order to catch the low tide at Hopewell Rocks. The picture below is low tide, a difference of 39 feet from high tide. In the spring the tides can reach as much as 51 feet. Its kind of eerie walking on the ocean floor where the water would have been thirty feet over our heads just eighteen or nineteen hours earlier.





We headed south later in the day and walked around the town of Alma a bit before striking out for Fundy National Park where we swam and hung out at Bennet Lake for the afternoon.
Pictured are fishing boats left high and dry at Alma when the tide goes at in the Bay of Fundy. Also pictured: Us at Bennet Lake in Fundy national Park. Could somebody have gained a pound or two on the trip? And I don't mean Janice. I'm working on my belly tan and if you saw me today I'd probably look a lot better!






Later we drove to Sussex, on a blistering hot afternoon, where we found a kiddie's water park. There we had dinner and splashed around in freezing water with some six-year-olds. Worn out and cooled off we moved camp to Wal-Mart where we drank wine with two couples from Calgary and another from Fairmont, BC.

In the morning I took the truck to Canadian Tire for an oil change, which worked out great because they were right across the street from Wal-Mart. But, as were driving towards Saint John, I noticed the engine light was on. When I checked, the new oil filter was leaking. We took it to Canadian Tire in Saint John where they replaced the filter, but when we got back in the truck the engine light was still on. The service guys said that it was a strange coincidence and had nothing to do with the oil change. They said they’d have to put it on the diagnostic machine and find out what it was. $65 later they said that they had the codes for what was wrong but didn’t know what they meant! So, they said they’d turn the engine light off, but then couldn’t. We walked out frustrated and still had a broken truck.

The next morning we took it to the Ford dealership and they discovered it was some fuel sensor letting in too much air and it was fixed in a jiffy for $98. I went back to Canadian Tire to get my money back but after getting stonewalled by the Service Manager and then going through the same thing with the Store Manager I came out of the Canadian Tire Store an unhappy customer. Don’t take your vehicle there, they have no idea about what they’re doing - they admitted to all kinds of faults with what they’d done and even to their own lack of expertise, but there was no refunding the money.

Saint John New Brunswick was a bit of a disappointment. While the downtown is funky with lots of old brick buildings - looks like a great big Yaletown - there is a pulp mill and an oil refinery located right next door, so the air quality leaves something to be desired. Sorry cousin Martin, Saint Johns, Newfoundland wins, hands down. Pictured is a cruise ship at Saint John as well as some of the brick buildings downtown.


Stopping in Black’s Harbour, another haunt of Janice’s relatives, we were chased out of town by the overwhelming smell of the sardine processing plants. We drove on to Saint Andrews By The Sea, which, in contrast, is an exquisite little example of a meticulously maintained historic town. The Kinsman Campsite, where we stayed, was on some of the most expensive real estate in Saint Andrews. Pictured is the Bay of Fundy in front of our campsite at Saint Andrews by The Sea. It has a mile of beachfront which was perfect because, by maritime standards, we’re enduring an extraordinary heat wave, with temperatures of 35+ degrees.