A Blitz through New England and Upstate New York

I know....it's been a long time since I posted on this blog -- which I had promised would chronicle our cross country camping trip -- but I have two good excuses:  first, we've been having lots of fun with family and friends which left little time for getting on the computer; and second, even when I did have time to get on the computer, I have had little or no access to internet -- and what I've had has been extremely slow.  It seems that mountainous New England and upstate New York, while beautiful to look at, are not the best places for Verizon wireless signals.  So while I sometimes had enough phone signal to make calls, check email, etc., it was not enough to connect my "hot spot" to my computer.  Enough with the excuses -- here is what we've been doing the last couple of weeks.

My last post was about our camping in Virginia near Jamestown.  From there we went up to Justin and Terri's house in St. Leonard, MD for Memorial Day weekend.  Mattie and her family came down and we had our usual Thomas/Wynne family "Staycation" fun.  The first day of the weekend was cool and cloudy so we played yard games (and ate and drank).

By Sunday, though, it had warmed up enough for water sports.  There were an abundance of water toys available, including our 23 foot skipjack which we had trailered up to Justin's a couple of weeks before.  We are leaving it at his dock for the summer.

We left Justin and Terri's on Tuesday and headed up to Greenwich, New York where we lived from 1971 to 1980.  On the way, we stopped for a night in the Poconos in Pennsylvania at a beautiful state campground called "Promised Land".  In Greenwich, we stayed with good friends Annie and Dave Townsend who live on the dead end dirt road where we built our house many years ago.  Our friends Kate and Sally came up from Connecticut to join the fun (Kate's son lives just down the road from Dave and Annie) and we had a great dinner with them and other old Greenwich friends.  Our visit there was rather brief and there was so much fun and laughter that I forgot to take any pictures -- the only picture I have was taken on a driving tour of the area.  This is the farm house we rented when we first moved up there from Long Island in 1971, when I was pregnant with Justin.  The house is right on a nice size pond and I think we paid $115/month rent.

We left Greenwich on Friday, May 31st and headed northeast (doesn't seem like the right direction for a cross country trip does it?) to Newport, Maine to visit with our good friends Rick and Gayle Perlmutter who have a beautiful house in the country, right on a big lake.  We met Rick and Gayle in 1981 when we were sailing south to the Bahamas for the first time on our schooner, Lanakai.  They were living on their boat, Big Otter, with their two girls and we were traveling with our kids.  We both stopped in the same anchorage and the rest is history.  They are now into skiing and love living in Maine and we love visiting them there -- in the summer!

We had several lovely days with them.  Rick is a gourmet cook and we ate some incredible meals and drank delicious wines from their well-stocked wine cellar.  We canoed on their lake.  We had worried about whether Poppy would behave in the canoe but she is great -- she just lies on the bottom and looks around:

We spent a day at Acadia National Park on the Maine coast which was really spectacular.

We left Rick and Gayle on Wednesday, June 5th and headed west again, stopping overnight in Vermont near Lake Champlain, and then continuing on to Saranac Lake, NY to visit Bob's brother Ronnie and his wife Josie who live near there.  We stayed at a state campground that was primitive -- we didn't mind having no electricity but the cold showers on a cold, rainy day were a little hard to take.

When we left Saranac, we headed south west toward the Finger Lakes where we planned to spend a few days.  It was raining in Saranac and for the next few days, and though driving through the Adirondack Park was beautiful, even in the rain, the lack of sunshine and being confined in our tiny RV in the evenings was starting to get to us and the mountainous terrain was causing our truck, pulling the camper, to guzzle gas like crazy.  We were looking forward to getting to the Finger Lakes, setting up our camper with the R-dome (tent) and spending a few days, relaxing, drinking wine and seeing the sights.

All about our Finger Lakes visit in the next installment!  Also, by popular request, more about the R-pod camper and the logistics of life in a tiny teardrop with a very big dog.