New England 10/15 East Dummerton, VT

Today we drove to East Dummerton, VT. Nana had seen a review that listed nearby Brattleboro as one of the ten best places to live in the country (wish I could find the reference). So, we drove in. Supposed to be lots of artists and some "counter culture" people. We've been to weird places and loved them. We've been to Portland, OR. Remember the nude bicyclists in Freemont, WA last year? Brattleboro doesn't get on the list. It has a great New England church:


It has a curious former church that is now a drug store:




It also has street people, really weird other people, a lot of closed restaurants, and we couldn't wait to get out.

A friend of Poppa's warned us to not "over-dose on quaint" while in Vermont. According to the local news, the locals are over-dosing on something else. Vermont came in first in drug use/per capita.

- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa

New England 10/14 Quechee VT

Today we're in Quechee, Vermont, and it has been beautiful driving across New Hampshire into Vermont. The scenery has changed from (beautifully) rugged in the White Mountains to beautiful in Vermont. To be accurate, note that we are only a few miles across the border from NH into VT.

People we talked to in Maine recommended stopping to see Texas Falls near here, so we did:
Texas Falls.

We visited the Taftsville Country Store:


and were impressed by this old house next door:


Four chimneys - pretty cozy in the winter.

We visited Sugarbush Farm, where they make cheese, tap maple trees to make maple syrup, and generally run an independent family farm.
We learned about maple syrup:







This is how much syrup 1 tree will produce in a year:




Family farms like this are disappearing across the country, and being replaced by agribusiness. Autumn and Brenna's mommy sent Poppa this email recently:

Our farmers need our help! The FSMA would put additional demands on small farmers that are unnecessary and burdensome....and would make it even harder for small farms to stay in business. Please see below, and consider commenting to the FDA.
http://www.kretschmannfarm.com/all-hands-on-deck-your-fresh-food-supply-our-farm-is-in-danger

She's in Pennsylvania, but it applies here too in New England. There are a lot of organic farms here, as there are back in Pennsylvania, but they need help to survive.

We also visited the Quechee Gorge:



Poppa walked down to the bottom for this picture looking back to the bridge:





- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa

New England 10/13 Back to Mt. Washington

On Sunday we went back to Mt. Washington and found a road that was easier on Nana's nerves:



Check out The Mount Washington Cog Railway

Here is the first engine to take cars to the top:




On the way up, we averaged a 12% grade, with a maximum of 37.5.%. That means that for every 100 feet we went forward, we went UP 37.5 feet! It is steep! Poppa was sitting in his seat when he took this picture of a building next to the train tracks:


The building is level, but the train is pointed up so far that the building looks like it is falling down.

Wow - this link is complicated. If it works, it will show a video of a Cog Railway train arriving at the peak of Mt. Washington:

A Cog Railroad train arriving at the peak of Mt. Washington

Can you see the chains that hold this building down so it doesn't blow away?



This is the Tip Top House:



After leaving Mt. Washington again, we saw another one of these signs:


We've seen the signs all over New Hampshire, but I think they're giving moose a bad name. Dottie and I met a moose, and he's a really funny guy:




As long as we're in New England, land of the Pilgrims, what could be more appropriate than a pilgrimage?

Route 2 here is called the "Presidential Highway", because it goes past the Presidential Range. Here is a string of mountains named after Presidents of the United States. You've seen Mt. Washington, and there are more. Three of them are in "The Great Gulf Wilderness", 5,658 acres with no buildings and one dirt road.

Poppa made a pilgrimage to take this picture:


To the right, with a cloud at the top, is Mt. Washington. Moving left, is Mt. Jefferson, followed by Mt. Adams (above the bottle), and finally, just above the yellow tree, Mt. Madison.

Mt. Adams is named for John Adams, second president of the United States. The mountain has two subpeaks. One is named Mt. Quincy Adams, for John Adams' son, also a president of the United States. The other subpeak is Mt. Sam Adams, named for a cousin of John Adams. Sam was a revolutionary, possibly a radical one preaching violence, and probably one of the planners of the Boston Tea Party. It is also reported that he was a beer brewer. That explains the pilgrimage. (Let us not get into any discussion of the modern Tea Party stuff.)

Poppa does want to update the picture he posted of his keychain last year. This picture is for you, DDBIV:



(O.K., ho can see what's wrong with this picture?)

- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa

New England 10/12 Mt. Washington

Today we drove the Mt. Washington Auto Road. Nana got pretty nervous when she saw this sign at the entrance:



Dottie and I were offering odds that she would end up on the floor in the back seat like last year out west. She didn't, but it was close.

The road is 8 mile of narrow two-way traffic, no guard rails, steep drop offs. Dottie and I saw great scenery; Poppa was driving, so he couldn't look at it; Nana had her eyes closed.

At the top, there was lots of scenery:







It's not always nice here. There can be snow in any month of the year, dense fog, and hurricane force winds. Check out this sign:


One higher wind has been seen in Australia since 1934, but not much higher.

Admission to the Auto Road included a CD telling about the road. Poppa can lend it to anyone who is interested. It's really interesting. We also got this bumper sticker:


I've seen this bumper sticker back in Pittsburgh, but I thought it was talking about THAT Mt. Washington:



Nana has been using a book by Fodor to plan some of our visits in New England, and it recommended two little towns nearby as very fun to visit. We started on that trip and then got to North Conway. Actually, we got ALMOST to North Conway, and then had two miles of bumper-to-bumper crawling traffic. It seems that North Conway is famous for it's shopping. It was insane! We gave up and changed our plans. Following Rt. 302, we stopped to see "The Old Man of the Mountain". We knew we wouldn't actually see it, because it fell down in 2003.



Still the story of its formation and its importance to Maine was interesting.

- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa

New England 10/11 To the White Mountains

O.K., I've been goofing off instead of blogging. Nana says I don't get any more S'Mores until I catch up. Be patient, I'll post for each day of the trip, even if the rest will be after the fact. Pay attention to the dat in the title (10/11 for October 11), not the date it was posted.

We drove across southern Maine to the White Mountains in New Hampshire today, to a little town called Twin Mountains. The scenery is great, but Poppa's camera isn't:




Since this was our last day in Maine, I have a little story to tell you about Poppa. Last summer, in Pittsburgh, he bought some body wash/shampoo from Tom's of Maine, which he likes because it doesn't have any fragrance. He's been running out of it on this trip, but thought he could easily get more "Tom's of Maine" in New England. Connecticut, no. Rhode Island, no. Massachusetts, no. MAINE - NO! None. Nada. Every other product on the shelves has fragrance. He finally gave up, flipped a coin, and settled for Coast "Pacific Force". Don't tell Poppa, but it smells more like "Pacific Low Tide". Nana opens the windows when he takes a shower. Maybe we can find it again in Pittsburgh and get some for his birthday.

- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa

New England 10/10 MDI to Augusta ME

One of the attractions we saw on MDI was the sand bar going from Bar Harbor to Bar Island. The sand bar is exposed during low tide.



The moon and the sun cause the tides on earth - their gravity pulls the water in the oceans toward them, so as the earth rotates the water moves up and down the seashore. There are two "high tides" each day, and two "low tides" each day.

This morning, the lowest tide would be at 9:03. We got there at about 8:45 and the sand bar looked like this:


Six hours from now, this sand bar will be under 4 to 8 feet of water!


See the rock in the water on the left? Remember it.
Here is a view of Bar Harbor from the top of Bar Island:


I climbed up for a look. Poppa had to help Dottie, because dogs don't climb very well:



Autumn's mommy tells me that Autumn climbs as well as I do:



$5 minutes later we are coming back across the sandbar. Can you see that the rock on the left isn't in the water any more?



This is low tide.

The families that owned Bar Island argued about development of the island and plans to build a bridge across the sand bar. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. quietly bought up the 1/3 of the island at the sand bar around 1908 to keep the island from being developed. He also paid for the Acadia National Park Loop Road and made other major contributions to the national Park system.

It's interesting that he hated cars, because his father, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. founded Standard Oil, and that is why the family were gazillionaires. For anyone interested in robber barons, there are two books that Poppa recommends: "The Prize", by Daniel Yergin, and "Titan", by Ron Chernow.

One more thing before we leave Maine. They keep talking about "Down East" when the rest of us would be saying "up the coast of Maine". You can check it out on Google, but the main (Maine) idea is that they were sailing down the wind as it blows east on the Maine coast.

After we left MDI, we west across part of Maine to Gardiner, where we had a laundry and grocery day. We need to get back in touch with that campground to ask about the beautiful evergreen at the entrance and about the list of "nearbys" - Paris: 73 miles,Peru: 82 miles,... Maybe more on that later!

- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa

New England 10/9 Schoodic Peninsula

On Wednesday we drove to the Schoodic Peninsula. It is only 4 miles from Bar Harbor across Frenchman Bay, but a little further away driving along the coast.

If you could read the small print on this sign, you would see that the Sullivan Harbor Land Company hoped to subdivide and develop this area - declaring to visitors "the necessity of coming here instead of Bar Harbor." The company ran into financial difficulties in 1895 and their plans evaporated.



The Peninsula is largely undeveloped for tourists, but interesting to drive around.





There is a portion of Acadia National Park here, but we all know what the story is with the parks. At the (closed) entrance to the park, we met a woman from South Dakota and her boyfriend from from England. They were each riding a motorcycle and just stopped for a pee break in the same bushes that Nana used. She took a year off from her job as a hotel manager in South Dakota to ride her motorcycle. They spent 3 months in Canada and now are working their way down through the States to a goddaughter in North Carolina. During her time in Canada, she endured a lot of barbs about Guantanamo ("If you get a speeding ticket in Canada, we won't send you to Guantanamo, Eh?"). More recently she has had to put up with questions like "What do you mean, your government is shut down? How can a government shut down? Bloody Yanks!"

I wish we could have talked to them more. When we met them we were on a little bridge that ended at the signs saying "Acadia Park Closed". Another couple drove up in their car and joined the conversation. He was agitating for everyone to just defy the "Closed" mandate and drive in. She was saying "He's usually not this way!" I took his picture, just in case I would see him on the evening news:



From the same bridge we saw a beautiful island with a house and some boats - what a beautiful view they have:



Leaving the peninsula we saw where a small bay, Taunton, connects with Frenchman Bay through a small channel. The tidal flow going in and out creates rapids and dangerous waters for commercial boats:
Tidal Falls between Taunton Bay and Frenchman Bay

This sign tells some of it:






This neat stone building was used to store salt used by fishermen to cure their fish when they ventured out onto the Grand Banks - check out the movie "Perfect Storm".




- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa

New England 10/8 Cadillac Mountain

About 400 years ago, the kings of England and France promised lands here along the northern Atlantic coast to different people. The English eventually prevailed, but the French did leave evidence of their presence. "La Cadie" became "Acadia". The people here were called "Acadians". When the French Huguenots left here and moved to Louisiana, "Acadian" became "Cajun". Cadillac Mountain is named for Samuel Cadillac, a Frenchman who gave up here, moved west, founded the city of Detroit Michigan, and later had a car named after him. (Yes, that car.) Another person given lands here was Champlain, who gave up, moved west, and had a lake named after him.

Cadillac Mountain is on MDI. At 1,530 feet, it is the highest point on the Atlantic coast until you get to Brazil. Last summer we were above 12,000 feet out west, and even back home in Pennsylvania we have Mt. Davis at 3,213 feet. Mt. Katahdin further north in Maine is 5,269 feet.

OK, so Cadillac Mountain isn't really very tall, but that's where we are. From October 7 through March 6, it is the first place to see the sunrise in the United States. And a bunch of people get up early to drive up there to do exactly that. Sunrise is around 6:30 now.

Did you notice that I said "drive"? Well, now that Congress has closed Acadia and all the other parks, you can't drive there. But you can still walk into the park or ride bicycles in. Not surprisingly, few people get to the top to watch the sunrise.

However, on Tuesday, Dottie and I went with Poppa to walk up the Southern Trail to the peak of Cadillac Mountain. Nana decided that a casual stroll around Bar Harbor was more to her liking. We took the car to Blackwood Campground, parked, and started up the 3.5 mile trail to the summit. The path started out through tall trees. The ground was a collection of granite rocks and boulders, with a web of tree roots running back and forth looking for dirt. Pretty tricky footing for the first mile.

Then the trees gave way to smaller scrub brush and the roots disappeared. Now it was just rocks and boulders, smoother walking for the second mile. The third mile got steeper, and took as much time as the first two miles. The last half mile has some big steps, while Poppa's steps were getting smaller. We had passed 5 couples and 1 younger guy on the way up. He and the last couple got to the top before us. Poppa's right hip was giving out.

Well, the view was great!

Video from the peak of Cadillac Mountain

(Hope that YouTube video works!)

To prove that we were up there:







Poppa didn't think it was safe for hime to go back down the rough trail, so we walked down the road that goes to the main Cadillac Mountain entrance. SLOWLY. Poppa called Nana and asked her to take the bus to the Blackwood Campground, pick up the car, and meet us at the Cadillac Mountain entrance. She got there at the same time we did, which impressed a woman walking down behind us - "Now, THAT'S service!"

We drove to Southwest Harbor and had lunch at the Drydock Cafe and Inn. The building was featured as the hardware store in the 1999 film "Storm of the Century", from a book by Stephen King. They have pictures of the fake snow blanketing the front during filming.

Our waitress, Annie, was born and raised in Southwest Harbor, so she claims the title "Maniac". Some towns here have a "Maine Street".

After we got back to the RV, Dottie and I asked if we could do the hike again tomorrow. I don't think it's going to hapen:




- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa

New England 10/7 Gvt Shutdown is a PITB!

Meanwhile, back in Pittsburgh, Siggie doesn't seem to be suffering from stress:


We didn't leave him on his own for the month. Erin is taking good care of him:


Thanks, erin - hope he doesn't hog too much of the bed:



OK, back to MDI. We went back to Bar Harbor today and browsed through a museum dedicated to the Indians who used to live here. There is evidence that Paleo-Indians lived here as far back as 4000-6000 years ago! More recently, they made some beautiful birch-bark canoes, which have recently been reproduced:







Every village on the island has an Episcopal Church. Some don't have the traditional red doors:







Now the government shutdown is getting to be a real Pain In The Butt! We drove all over today to find the beginning of a trail that Poppa can use to hike to the top of Cadillac Mountain. This is the highest point on the Atlantic coast until you get to Brazil in South America. He doesn't want to miss the chance at this, but has to hike in from outside the park. So far, that wouldn't have been a problem, because lots of people are just parking outside the park and walking in. But on the news tonight there was a story about a woman who hiked in, fell, and had to be rescued. Thismight cause them to tighten up the closure before Poppa, Dottie, and I get started in the morning. Wish us luck and check your piggy banks to see if you can help with bail.

- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa