The time has come for our biggest trip since hauling Prufrock from her Los Angelos birthplace to our home in Maryland.
We’ve scoped out a northern excursion to explore Maine and the Atlantic provinces in Canada. We hope to be on the road for more than a month – from our departure in late July 2024 until Labor Day.
Since our last trip to Virginia wineries over Memorial Day, our HCT got a new home. The Columbia Association notified us that a space was available at the Columbia RV park, about 10 minutes from our home, and about $170 less per month than what we had been paying at a CubeSmart facility in Frederick. We pounced.
(As a side note, the Columbia RV park folks told us last October that they were no longer accepting names on the wait list, because it had grown to three years in length. I insisted on getting on the list, and, it was a solid insist.)
As always, there is a small technical glitch, which I will outline at the end.
One of our big objectives as we get into this is to avoid the New York megalopolis as much as we can as we travel north. For this voyage, we took the Mario Cuomo Bridge to White Plains for a street parking evening, then did our real launch on David’s birthday – July 26.
We headed from White Plains into Massachusetts for a Harvest Host stop in East Brookfield Mass., near Worcester, Timberyard Brewing. After parking in the early evening, we ate a nice meal, downed some good beers, and vibed to a funky jam band named Bigelow. Loved the pink guitar.
Our destination the next day was Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, and we stopped for a run on the Nashua River Rail Trail, from its southern terminus in Ayer, Mass. We made it to our party with friends, celebrating the marriage of Sarah and Chris, daughter and son-in-law of great friends Joe and Charlene. They gave us another inside bed night, which meant true luxury and the first two out of three nights of the trip in a home, with showers.
But that ended the next day, as we departed for a Harvest Host location in Bradly, Maine near Orono. Spencer’s Ice Cream gave us a nice flat spot along the Penobscot River. Nothing fancy, but fine for us – with an electric plug in. The next morning, we had a nice chat with the building’s owner – a full-time RVer who likes to help out others. We could have all the water we wanted, she said. She also invited us to stay at her tree farm nearby if we ever wanted.
On Monday, it was on to Lubec, the easternmost point in the U.S., where our temporary caravaning partners, Tim and Kathy, had arrived. We unhitched in the gorgeous Cobscook State Park, then joined our friends for a spectacular coastal hike in Quoddy Neck State Park, with amazing views and terrain.
Tim and Kathy’s Inn was in sight of the Campobello Roosevelt estate which is technically in Canada. The next day, we also made it into Canada ourselves, driving from Lubec to St. John, New Brunswick.
We were hoping for small-city charm but didn’t quite get it. The hills that pull away from the Saint John river gave us some echoes of Portland, Maine, and Liverpool, England – but Saint John is a real working industrial town (the home of Irving Oil, with the refineries nearby to prove it) and despite some historic buildings and downtown charm there’s not much to offer visitors. We spent some time at the Reversing Tides lookout point to see what was billed as a geological wonder, and were incredibly underwhelmed.
But our Prufrock stay in Rockwood Park was grand. This is a large ubran park well within the city, with seven lakes and lots of trails within its 2,200 acres. Our six-mile trail run on Wednesday morning was just what we needed.
Some of the run was on the Trans Canada trail, which is very cool – and we saw a sign that awarded the park a major prize for urban planning. Well deserved.
Technical update
When we got Prufrock out of storage, the power was completely dead – which is disappointing. At home, when I wanted to plug into shore power, I found that the external plug-in socket was filled with water. Yikes!
So I unscrewed and disconnected it, dried it out with a hairdryer, and put things back together. Current began flowing, and all power came on.
But I don’t know the root cause of why the power went out in the first place. So, I’m a bit nervous and keeping eyes on meters.
And for this trip – the Truma Combi furnace is out, with the temperature sensor error being permanent, not intermittent. I’ve got a service appointment in September to address this.
