Day 17 - 2025 East Coast Adventure - Into the Whites

8/3 - Bangor, ME to Moosebrook State Park, NH

Everyone slept through night and we woke up to 56 deg. Man summer in the north is nuts!  Got ourselves moving, ate some breakfast and then explored the fishing pond. We counted about 20 frogs and a couple of giant bullfrogs. After counting and sharing the count with everyone, we hit the road. 


I took the scenic route again which brought us across central Maine. We had a near miss situation where I swerved a bit to avoid the guy nearly running the stop sign and ran over a hunk of wood. Then we heard a noise and pulled over. Thankfully, this is what we found. Good job mud flap, have a Scooby snack. 


After a brief stop for some milk, we proceeded to a rest area next to a river for lunch. Beautiful landscape and Robinson got to meet a corgi!  We snacked and continued on. From there on, we were officially in Honda Odyssey killing zone, AKA the mountains. Thankfully, Rover is fully equipped for situations like this and took us into camp without any issues. 


Somewhat inspired by the crossing of the Appalachian trail that we saw (there were some folks there handing out trail magic to the hikers), we went on our own hike after setting up camp. While we didn't go up Mt Washington or anything like that, we did cover over 5 miles and enjoyed some lovely trail time near the streams. While we spotted some moose prints, we didn't get to see any large fauna. 




Once back, we stopped at the ranger station for some firewood for the evening. I decided I liked Moosebrook enough that I got myself a hat!  

Then we met the boys over by the "swimming pool". The "swimming pool" is water almost as clear as a swimming pool, but is mountain stream fed so it is COLD. Robinson braved it more than the rest of us (no surprise there), but all of us at least put our feet in. They actually have a jump off spot, but none of us wanted to get that cold.  Still, a cool feature. 






From there, we headed back to camp for some dinner (bagel egg and cheese sandwiches) and then dessert of s'mores over the fire. It's been over 2 weeks and this is one of the first times it has felt like camping. It's nice to be able to sit still in the woods for a bit.  Hopefully tomorrow is more of the same as we move from the white mountains to the greens. 




Trip mileage - 2,901
# States - 12
# Provinces - 3

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts after a month back home

Image
It's been a month since I got home.  I wanted to put some notes of reflection on record, but I also wanted to have a chance to re-connect with the normal world before I did.  30 days feels like a good number of days to have the perspective to come to some conclusions on the trip and life in general.  So, here goes. Main notes from the trip     - The USA has a LOT to see in it.  As a family we only entered ten states and really only entered two of them (Idaho and Arizona) in passing on the highway.  We spent almost eight weeks in these eight states and saw snow capped mountains, farmlands, deserts, canyons, rivers, waterfalls, rain forests, sandy beaches, rocky coasts, and volcanoes.  There are many countries that can't offer half of this list.      - Despite having nine weeks to do all the exploring we did, it felt rushed.  We covered almost 7,500 miles in those nine weeks so there's a reason it felt rushed, but when I left, of...
Read more

Day 2 - 2025 East Coast Adventure - Dolphins and a Water Park in a State Park

Image
 7/19 - Chesapeake, VA to Killens Pond, DE Well the anticipated storm as we went to bed arrived and dumped LOTS of rain on us.  AS such, we had a damp start to morning. Amy woke early and had gone out for coffee (I forgot to pack ground coffee - first discovered mistake) and gas us up. She encountered lots of closed stores that early, but persistence paid off.  We enjoyed bagels for breakfast and then boys explored park while Amy and I packed up trailer. We had a long drive day so we didn't linger.    After a minor detour, we found the route to the bridge tunnel highway. After a quick inspection "are your propane tanks closed?", we were onto the bridge/tunnel.  As our first surprise of the trip, before we reached the first tunnel section, we saw 30-40 dolphins in the water!  Unfortunately, only Sebastian and I got to see them before we drove past.  However, we all got to see many kayakers/boats enjoying their Saturday on Chesapeake Bay. We enjoyed...
Read more

Day 1 - 2025 East Coast Adventure - On the Road Again

Image
7/18 - Raleigh to Chesapeake Well, we're underway, but no thanks to me. I SIGNIFICANTLY underestimated all the things left to do to get underway this evening. I started the day with maintenance on the camper (always best to do the day of travel) and then worked my way to other activities.  However, when Amy got home, there was still a LOT of material that had not been packed in either Rover or Dover.  As such, our packing became more of a "throw it all in the camper and figure it out later". And, in an auspicious start to the day, this new technique was done in the middle of a random downpour. Since we were now starting in the middle of Friday rush hour, we learned that there was traffic on our route.  So we diverted and got a tour of eastern Wake county. I can say that corn looks good, but the beans look GREAT.  Given the potential, this start to the trip turned out to be a really nice way to start the drive. We were cruising along on 64, which had surprisingly low...
Read more