Hey, this really is a vacation!

Human life, where ever it might be, often settles into a routine–and routines can be both comforting and stifling.  Even up here at camp, it can sometimes be hard to see the forest for the trees (see what I did there?)  Allison works very hard for IA/FA, often driving long hours to Boston or Portland to transport campers and staff to and from the airport, and doing many other miscellaneous things that are requested of her... and I have to do my real job Monday through Friday as well.  Plus, it involves a great deal of work to relocate a family of 5 for over two months.

(Now, before you Texas friends start sending the daggers my way, hear me out... I'm going somewhere with this)

The point is, it's easy sometimes to get wrapped up in the day-to-day, and to forget to count your blessings.  That's true whether it is in Maine, Texas, or any other spot on this celestial orb.  But one of the magical things about this place is that I find it a lot easier to do that refocusing.. that "retraining of the mind", so that I can truly absorb the goodness that God has placed all around me, for me to enjoy.   I don't know whether it's the "slowing down of time"  that one feels here (I literally had to remind about 4 people the other day that it was, indeed, Friday), or just the natural beauty of a place where the predominant substrata element is not concrete... but all I have to do is get out from behind my work desk, step out the cabin... and if I give it any effort at all on my part... the vacation is there.

To feel like you're taking a vacation when, technically, you are not.  How cool is that?

On the other hand, the week before camp starts is (for me) a true vacation-vacation.  I often take the whole week off when we are traveling, and have several days up here before I need to resume work.  The boys are also milling around, having nothing to do until camp starts, so we go play.  And all the camp staff get a day off right before camp starts, so there is a family vacation day in there as well.  And we used it.  And used it well.

Down East Coney Island

For Logan, a perennial request is to go to coast, so we packed up and headed to Old Orchard Beach.  OOB might not be everyone's cup of tea–it is sort of the Coney Island of Maine, but the boys love it and there is a lot of culture there.  It is a favorite "weekender" spot for many French Canadiens... so much so that it is not uncommon to see street signs (deep in the interior of Maine, including here in Fryeburg) that point visitors from up north to OOB.

Partaking o' poutine

If you keep your ears open, you will hear plenty of French being spoken on the streets and the sand... and then there are crepes...and poutine–a rather unique dish of french fries, brown gravy and cheese curds...and Ryan likes to get some every time we go.
I like poutine... but this time Logan and I went after the fried dough.  For my Texas buddies, this is basically a funnel cake without the gaps. :)

Doesn't that look healthy!?!

The only thing about coming to the coast this early in the summer season is the water temps...who am I kidding, it's cold all year in the North Atlantic... but even the few degrees difference that a month or so makes is significant.  This water is COLD.  In mid-June, the historical average is about 54F.  So, I sit on the beach and read. :)  So does Matthew.  The only one of the boys who does not care is Logan, which is why he is the one who requests the beach trip each year.  He cavorts in this frigid water almost non-stop.  I swear that boy is part seal.

Da Boys on Da Beach

After the beach visit, we rushed back to camp just in time for the first campfire of the year.  This one is always special because it is the pre-camp version, made up of counselors and staff from both camps, and incorporates special traditions from both the girl's side and the boy's side.  I would consider my year grossly incomplete if I did not get to hear "My Mom Was A Lifeguard" and "Illinois Song" by the FA ladies– I wouldn't miss this campfire for anything.

A couple of days later, the whole family bugged out for some fun.  For the first time, the boys got to enjoy my favorite breakfast spot in North Conway, Priscilla's.  Three teenage boys in a place with good breakfast food and large combo plates?  They went to town, both on Priscilla's food and my pocketbook!  Afterwards, we stopped by to get Ryan a haircut to last him for the summer (and he put me in deep kimchi with several Friends-Who-Will-Remain-Anonymous back in Texas), then headed out to Echo Lake State Park on the west side of North Conway.

Could you spend a day here?

This idyllic spot is a great way to spend the day here.  With only a $4 entry fee to the park, lots of shaded picnic tables and a great sandy beach, this is a wonderful place to while away the afternoon swimming, reading, or doing art at one of the tables.   Unlike the sea coast, which is at the mercy of the Labrador Current, the water here is merely spring-fed, and thus is a more tolerable temperature in the mid-60s.  Just right for cooking yourself in the sun, jumping in, rinse, repeat, etc.

After a full day there, we went up to Cathedral Ledge, which is a lookout point at the top of that there sheer cliff overlooking Echo Lake.  This is pretty much a standard-canon visit if you are up here.  One must go to Cathedral Ledge.  We chose to use the road and drive, but when we got there, we met a couple of guys who misunderstood "rope" for "road"... they came up the hard way.  Looks like they were having fun.

A picture might be worth a 1000 words,
but the words that went with this picture were Allison's...
"Ryan!!!! Don't go so close to the edge!!!

I think Matthew has always been
part-aborigine

Then we traveled just a few minutes south of Conway to visit the Madison Boulder.  I had read about this in one of my "northeast" magazines.  This is a huge... and I mean huge... glacial erratic.  It was breathtaking standing next to this monstrosity, a 5,000-ton oddity so out of place in the surrounding woods.  This truly is a wondrously beautiful world with so much designed in it for our enjoyment.

That is one big rock

Talk about enjoyment.. our final stops of the evening were for food.  First, when the rains came and washed out our first choice of restaurant (with it's outdoor seating), we tried a new place that had just opened in North Conway.  And the burgers were indeed, Wicked Good.  We will be returning to this place.

More healthy food

To cap it all off, we stopped at our favorite Fryeburg ice cream place, Froagies.  According to the boys, we waited far too long to make our appearance here.  The ice cream was really good and the bugs were pretty much non-existent.  Always a nice combination.

And with that, thus ended the pre-camp vacation.  The following day promised a long Boston trip for Allison to pick up some international campers; for myself it was my computer job and a night of Abuse-The-Umpire at the annual pre-camp counselor softball game.

But while I am here, the vacation is not far away.  In the fantasy series The Wheel of Time, those who can use magic can always feel saidar and saidin (the male/female sources of power), just waiting to be drawn in and used, and doing so makes life more vibrant and complete for them.

Up here, vacation is like my saidar.  All I have to do is relax for a second, find my center, and it rushes in to fill me.  This place truly is magical.

Where ever you are this fine morning... take some time... find your center, and see if you can't find a little vacation in your day.

East Bound and Down, Loaded Up and Trucking, Vol 3

Ol' Smokey's got them ears on he's hot on your trail

He ain't gonna rest till you're in jail

So you got to dodge 'im and you got to duck 'im

You got to keep that diesel truckin'

Just put that hammer down and give it hell

This time, dear reader, you get a two-fer-one special.  Last two days of the migration in one blog post.  Mainly because there isn't a whole lot to tell about 3/4 of the third day.  :)  I could delineate the exact cost that the State of New York exacted in tolls for the privilege of driving over three hours on their freeways, but this blog is already boring enough, and you might be eating while reading this.

Two lovebirds (agapornis) spotted on the shore
of Hinckley Resevoir

We left the not-so-freeway near Verona, NY, and headed up through the Adirondack Mountains towards Plattsburgh, on the east coast of Lake Champlain.  We drove through beauty, and could tell we were closer to our summer home in Maine:  verdant mountain forests, lakes surprising you around a sudden curve in the road, and small towns dotted here and there with interesting features.

The as-the-crow-flies distance was less today, allowing for the occasional pullover at a lake or short trail headed down to a river.  Allison is especially susceptible to the call of a short (sometimes) trail.

The mountain river here was beautiful, but we had no bug spray handy, so we did not tarry long!

As we neared Plattsburgh, NY, I had a one-on-one with TripAdvisor.com, looking for an affordable place to eat with good reviews...that lead us to Bazzano's Pizza, about which the locals raved.  And yea verily, we partook of the Pizza and the Stromboli and the Calzone, and it was Indeed Good.  And the Calzone was mammoth in size for the price.  Amen.

About to do some serious damage to Italian food

For the first three days of our trip, most of the US was under a blanket of unusually warm weather, and when it turned out that the A/C was wonky in both rooms of our suite, it was looking like a miserably warm night... and here we were, only 52 miles or so from the Canadian border!  (Many signs in Plattsburg are bilingual, but unlike at home, ç'est le française!)  Fortunately, the identical suite across the hall was unoccupied, and the very helpful staff green-lighted our transfer.  And three teenage boys were tasked with hauling everything across the hall.  (See, they can be useful sometimes!)   We probably looked like one of those hallway bits from Scooby Doo.

Then it came.. the last day of the trip.  This was the morning we reserved for ourselves, to do something fun, in a part of the country that we had never seen before.  The morning started out with a short ferry ride on Lake Champlain...and I mean short.   14 minutes.  But we crossed the imaginary dotted line into Vermont while afloat, and were deposited on Grand Isle in the middle of Lake Champlain.  That's why it was a 14-minute ferry ride.  This is a big island in proportion to the lake.  

We went to visit an orchard in South Hero, at the (can you guess it?) southern end of the island, and we bought apple cider donuts and looked wistfully at the apple groves where we could not pick apples because it was to early in the summer.

Not quite ready to eat

A hop, skip and a jump over the bridge to the Vermont mainland, and it was on to Burlington, where we visited a chocolatier store for the SOLE PURPOSE of going to the bathroom.  (Ok, that might not have been the only reason.)  After being served coffees by the nicest barista I have ever met, we drove around Burlington to look at the waterfront and the central market area.  Unfortunately, there was not time to linger, but we have definitely added Burlington to our list of return sites someday.

From Burlington, we headed to Waterbury, VT, and since lunchtime was approaching, we needed a vector to some good food.  Logan wanted to do the searching this time... he fancies himself a connoisseur of food.  Based on the parameters he was given, he chose the Park Row Cafe.  As soon as we walked inside, we knew we had a winner, due to the long line of locals waiting to order their lunch.  We took ours to go and sat in the town park right across the street.  It was a lovely way to eat a good burger and fries.  Logan did us proud.

Then it was off to the place that put Waterbury on the national scene... the Ben & Jerry's ice cream factory.  We paid the coin for the tour, and got to watch as they made several hundred pints of Cherry Garcia.   Out of the 240,000 pints they would make that very day.  That's a lot of ice cream.  It was amazing seeing the size of the plastic bins with cherries in them, and the large boxes of chocolate chunks.  I can't show you any pictures because they were verboten during the tour.

After we got our free samples from the previous day's run (Americone Dream), we headed up to the "Flavor Graveyard", a fun little spot where B&J memorialized some of their flavors that flopped, or at least got retired for one reason or the other.   Each flavor was marked with headstone, with a cute poem bemoaning the demise of a flavor.

And then it was time... the last leg, with no further tourist stops.  We headed up through the Green Mountains, crossed into New Hampshire, and went north around and into the White Mountains.  With Mount Washington serving as our guide, we traversed the Crawford Notch and headed down into North Conway, NH...our first time ever that we approached camp from the north!  We pulled over at a scenic outlook, and let Matthew take the wheel for his first drive into camp.  I sat in one of the middle seats, and thus could safely capture the exact moment we crossed into Maine:

We passed through the totem poles and into our summer home.  Over 1900 miles in less than four days, and not a single stop by Smokey Bear.

We did what they said could not be done!

East Bound and Down, Loaded Up and Trucking, Vol 2.

Keep your foot hard on the pedal. Son, never mind them brakes.

Let it all hang out 'cause we got a run to make.

The boys are thirsty in Atlanta and there's beer in Texarcana.

And we'll bring it back no matter what it takes.

 Day two of our annual migration is always the longest–after stopping to stay with family or friends, we try to cover as much interstate as we can before calling it a night.  1,900 miles is a long way to go, and there's no way to avoid one very long driving leg if you are doing it in less than 5 days.  To make matters worse, our vector guarantees we will "add" an hour when we cross the galactic barrier into the Eastern Time Zone!

Since we are going to see Lake Champlain in Vermont on the way, the far-northern route is this year's itinerary...in fact, it would actually be quicker to go through Canada, but Allison and I need to get and/or update our passports, so we must stay in the US for now, eh?  After making it through Indianapolis (which has one of the most messed-up Interstate Loops around it that I have ever seen), we pointed our nose toward Toledo.  The home of the Mudhens is actually slightly out of the way if one isn't actually going to go through Canada, but it does have the advantage of being able to stop here for dinner:

I have been a M*A*S*H* fan for most of my life, and Tony Packo's is mentioned in 6 different episodes.  Jamie Farr, who played Klinger, was actually from Toledo, and he put Packo's on the international map by including it on the show.  This is the original restaurant, and the walls are covered with memorabilia, from signed hot-dog buns (in special sealed containers) to items from the famous TV show.  I had been here once before on a work trip, but it was fun to introduce the rest of the family to Hungarian style hot dogs and sausages.

After dinner, we headed towards Cleveland, hoping to get on the NE side of it before we stopped so we wouldn't have to traverse it during rush-hour traffic the next morning.  While Allison drove, I watched the NBA finals on my tablet, until she got just too tired and I had to take over.  To help me out, Allison decided to "commentate" the game to me...although it was much appreciated and kept me updated on the game, I don't think Mike Breen (or Bob Costas, Eric Nadel, et al) have to worry about keeping their jobs.....sorry, honey!

Shortly after the GSWs were putting the finishing touches on their victory and ending the Cavalier's season (sorry, Strader family!), we were getting close to the hotel that marked the end of our second leg of travel.  How do the folks in the Eastern Time Zone ever stay up and watch sports?  It would be hard on a night owl like myself.   For this day, the needs of travel dictated my bedtime, and it was a late one indeed.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

"Stopping by woods on a snowy evening"-- Robert Frost

East Bound and Down, Loaded Up and Trucking, Vol 1.

The Welch clan started a new tradition a couple of years ago... I remembered the old Jerry Reed song from "Smoky and the Bandit", and we adopted it as our "headed to Maine" song.  Every day on the trip, we start the morning by playing that song on the stereo system as we set off for the next waypoint on the way to  44.0472545°, -070.9555544°... otherwise known as Fryeburg, ME.

After the annual game of "Luggage Tetris" (wherein I try to fit way too much stuff into way too little van and overhead Yakima), the banjos started playing this year early on a Sunday morning, and we headed up towards Missouri via Hwy. 69 in Oklahoma.   Your intrepid blogger was adamant about trying to cut travel costs this year, so we brought along lunch-type food in bags and cooler and stopped for lunch at a city park in Chouteau, OK.

The family decided it wasn't such a bad lunch after all, and Matthew even had time to shinny up a tree.

Then it was on to Missouri to stay with some wonderful friends in St. Peters... they were most gracious to put our clan up for the night so Allison could have time to visit her Dad in St. Louis the next morning.  On the way, though, we made a late-afternoon stop in Springfield.. Allison wanted to show the boys the building where her grandfather's furniture shop used to be.. it is now a graphics firm.

The building is parceled out differently in the row of shops, and looks very different, but that is the nature of time and progress.  But as Matthew discovered when we looked at the alley, to see the door that Allison always remembered going into as a youngster, we all just need to:

After the trip down memory lane, it was time for some Mexican Villa before heading to the St. Louis area.  Allison found a "Mexican Villa" on Google that was much closer to I44 and would not delay us as much, but when we pulled up, it looked quite different from what I expected.  

Turned out this was a counter service version of Mexican Villa rather than a full restaurant.  The "Burrito Enchilada Style" may have come on a paper plate rather than a ceramic one, but it tasted just as good.

When we arrived at our friends house, we had a relaxing evening, and I even got to watch the NHL finals match between Pittsburgh and Nashville.  Our hostess hailed from Pittsburgh, and her family are Penguins fans, so it was fun to watch them win the cup from the couch at their house.  The perfect relaxing end to the first day.

The next morning, we headed over to the assisted living facility in St. Louis, and Allison took the boys in to see their Grandpa, while I went to Walmart for some replacement supplies.  On the way, I noticed this old railroad trestle bridge.

I love the railroad components you see in some of these older towns in the U.S.  The slogan that was painted on this one is showing its age, but the whole vignette smacks of a different time, and this kind of thing is a model railroader fan's delight.  If you look closely at the picture, you will find another clue about some historicity of this location... not only is the railroad old, but the actual road has an interesting past as well.  After the Walmart trip, I found a place to park the van where I could safely take a picture from beside the road... I couldn't pass this up.

After picking the family back up, we traversed Ol' Man River (the Mississippi), and headed east by nor'east to Toledo, OH.  And Jerry sang to us again:

East bound and down, loaded up and truckin',

We're gonna do what they say can't be done.

We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there.

I'm east bound, just watch ol' "Bandit" run.