New England #5 – New Hampshire

July 20 - 24, 2016: 

What do we know about New Hampshire, uh, nothing; it’s cold in the winter and we don’t know anybody from there. After our visit here we still don’t know much more.  The reality is that we are just not really staying long enough to get a real feel for the area.  We are getting a small taste of the state and we get to put a camping sticker on our country map.

Our USA State Map showing where we have camped.  This still has NH missing but not for long.

To cut some of the high cost of camping in the northeast we have been opting for 30 amp and no sewer.  It hasn’t been real hot so we have really only needed one AC unit which is mainly why we would need a 50 amp site.  As for sewer, since we are only staying 3-4 nights, the amount of waste is not enough to fill our tanks anyway.  The main benefit with having sewer on site is that it saves some time, about 30 minutes, when we leave.  If I have a sewer connection on the site I can dump the tanks while I am doing other stuff in preparation to leave.  The dump station is just added time. By not having 50 amp and no sewer connection we save usually about $10-15 a day.

Since we didn't have a sewer connection, before leaving our site in Brattleboro VT we had to go to the dump station before we hit the road.  After dumping we were on the road by just a little after noon.  Our trip from the KOA in Brattleboro VT to the Hidden Valley RV and Golf Resort in Derry New Hampshire was just an hour and a half at just 84 miles.  This was a very easy pull today and the weather was perfect too.  We basically just left Vermont going east in a straight line to Derry MH.  

We pulled up to the office at the Hidden Valley RV and Golf Resort around 2:30 in the afternoon.  We were a little late as we stopped and got some fresh sweet corn and blueberries at a roadside stand for dinner tonight.

Hidden Valley Golf and RV Resort Office.

The main reason we are staying at this campground is that we couldn’t get into any of the others around there as they were all booked up.  This has been a common problem as we travel in the northeast.  Hidden Valley was our last choice as it was way too expensive for us.  Our rate was $50 a night with no sewer and 30 amp electric service!  The site was a nice large level site with loads of trees for privacy though.  As the name says, there is a golf course on site that we still have to pay for.  We got a miserly 10% off making the cost making it $64 for the 2 of us with a cart.  We will say though that the course was pretty good.  So anyway we took what we could get and moved on.

Our site at Hidden Valley.

Our stay in New Hampshire wasn’t all that memorable except for one event.  I got a bug stuck in my ear!  Yup, a bug!

On our first full day in New Hampshire we decided we were going to play golf at the RV park course.  We teed off on the first hole and my ball went long but into the woods at the turn on the dogleg left hole.  There wasn’t much growth under the trees so my ball was easy to find.  I was going to punch the ball out low and back on the fairway when I was attached by a swarm of insects.  I was in my back swing when the attack occurred.  I dropped my club and started swatting the bugs away from my head.  As I was swatting I hit a bug knocking it into my left ear!  I could hear the damn thing running around in there!  I tried hitting my head on the other side with no luck.  Patty took a look and could see it but we just couldn’t get it out.

After trying to get the bug out on the course for about 15 minutes, we decided to quit playing and head back to the RV. Patty picked up our balls and we headed back to the RV to see if we could get the bug out with tweezers and better light. 

Nope, that didn’t work either.  The damn thing was driving me crazy!  It was moving around a lot and it felt like it was trying to burrow into my ear drum and then maybe get inside my head!  As a last resort I took a cotton ball and soaked it with rubbing alcohol and then dripped the alcohol into my ear. This really pissed off the bug as it was flailing around a lot now!  But after a few terrible minutes the bug stopped moving around, I think it died.  Sort of a WHEW!

So now I have, I hope, a dead bug in my ear that is not inside my head somewhere!  I tried to remove it with a Q-tip with no luck.  Now we head off to a local urgent care facility to get it removed.  I was so hoping that the bug was dead and not burrowed into my head or it was playing dead or both!  It took us about 20 minutes to get to the urgent care place and the bug still had not moved as far as I could tell.

By the time we got to an exam room the bug had been in my ear for about an hour and a half.  It seemed like 2 days by this time.  The doctor took a look inside my ear and didn't see anything! OH NO, it is inside my head!

The doctor said that it looked like I had a lot of wax in my ear and maybe the bug had burrowed into it, yuck!  I really not feeling any better about this at all!  The doctor had a nurse try to irrigate my ear with water and peroxide to flush the bug out.  After a few hard squirts out comes the bug.  It looks like it is a fairly big, to be in an ear, moth.  It was about 3/4 of an inch long and brown.  The doctor thinks that what she thought was ear wax was actually the moth.  OK then, I am relaxed now and just want to get the crap out of there!  Thank you very much ConvenientMD Urgent care in Derry NH!

There it is!  Still gives me the chills looking at it!

By this time it was early afternoon when we finished at the urgent care bug removal place so we searched out a place for lunch.  We found a nice Japanese place about 5 miles away.  We then had a great lunch and a few laughs about the bug.  The day turned out good but not at all like we had planned.  

Because we had sort of lost a day to the bug we decided to stay another day and start over.  The way we plan our trips we usually have latitude to spend extra time if we need it so we just decided to enjoy another nice warm weather day in this park.

We had some down time so we have been restoring our camp sign.  This is what it looked like before we started.  We got this sign our first year full timing at the Arizona State Fair.  That was 4 years ago.

This is the finished product.  It really came out great.  We think it is better than the original.  Patty redid the art work and I sanded.  We both took turns putting the 4 coats of poly on it.

The next day we resumed our golf at the course.  Actually we just started over as we hadn't even finished the first hole last time.  This time there wasn’t any bugs making life miserable!  We had a good day on the course taking us about 4 hours to finish.  It was just the way all golfers like it, no one behind pushing and no one ahead slowing us down.  We could just play golf!

Patty made it over the water!

We again tried to go to Boston to take a tour.  We were less than an hour away from downtown Boston so we thought that we could take the tour that we had tried a few days ago when we were in Massachusetts.  Well again we didn’t make it. Patty wasn’t feeling good so we just took a day off and just relaxed at home.  I guess we were just not supposed to take the tour this time around.  

That was pretty much it for New Hampshire and now we are off to #6 and the last of the New England states, Maine.

Stay tuned!

New England #4 – Vermont

July 15 - 20, 2016: 

We decided to take a little break here and stay a little bit longer.  We will be here in Vermont for the next 5 days.  This gives us some down time to relax and to catch up of some domestic chores like grocery shopping and laundry.  With the quick moves of just a few miles and the constant touring, it starts to feel like a whirlwind or more like a vacation instead of like life! This will be a small slow down for us.

The trip from Littleton MA to our new site in Brattleboro Vermont was just 80 miles through some very pretty country settings.  Our new site was just a few miles into Vermont at the Brattleboro North KOA.  This is a very small campground of maybe 40 sites.  We had great end of a row site that had loads of room.  We also can’t say enough about the friendliness of the campground hosts here.  We would stay here again too!

Bridge going from New Hampshire to Vermont

The Vermont - New Hampshire line.

Our nice site at the KOA.

Besides getting the laundry done and restocking our food supply we managed to get a couple other fun things done too.   On one day we did a six mile bike ride round trip on a trail along the West River.  The trail is a Rails to Trails trail that was once the old West River Railroad track bed.  This trail was mostly hard packed sand, weeds, and some gravel.  It wasn’t a difficult trail at all but it was challenging since we didn’t know the trail. 

Went through a covered bridge to get to the trailhead.

Then we crossed this old green iron bridge.  Actually that is how the directions read too, go through the covered bridge and then make a turn on to the old green bridge.

A man and his dog on the river next to the trail.

On another day we took a short 1.5 mile hike on the Putney Mountain Trail.  The trick with this trail was getting to and then finding the trailhead.  This area is definitely where people retire who don’t like people.  The houses out here are far apart and difficult to get to.  We were on roads marked as not maintained by the state or county and are only seasonal.  The hike was a fun little walk in the remote woods to get a feel for the real Vermont.

This was a trip!  We had to use GPS coordinates to get to the trailhead as we didn't have cell phone service here.  These roads are only used in the summer months.

We found loads of maple sap pipe lines running in the woods.

The trailhead was not marked very well.

Once we got to the actual trailhead it was marked then.

View from the summit

The town had sheep on the summit to eat away the weeds

After the forest mountain hike we had dinner out in Brattleboro. We went to the Whetstone Station Restaurant and Brewery that overlooked the Connecticut River.  There was a long wait to get a table outside in the main dining room so we took a table on the top floor that was mainly a bar.  We sat and had couple local beers and ate some pretty good bar food with a great view.  This was a perfect ending to our visit in Vermont.

The bar area

Over looking the Connecticut River

That's about it for Vermont for us.  We were just barely into Vermont and there is so much more to Vermont than what we are reporting here.  

On to New England # 5 - New Hampshire

Stay tuned!

New England #3 – Massachusetts

July 12 - 15, 2016: 

We didn’t have to drive very far again to get to our new site in Massachusetts from Rhode Island, just 95 miles.  Actually our next big move won’t be until we leave Quebec City in Canada.  All of our moves for the month of July will be less than 100 miles!

We are staying at the Minuteman RV Resort that is very close to Boston.  Minuteman is another campground that is very much in the woods with really tall pine trees.  So again, our satellite TV is out of the question here!  

The office and entrance to Minuteman campground.

Except for the satellite issue the campground is very nice; we would most definitely stay here again.  As for TV, we had something like 60 channels on our regular batwing antenna so not having satellite was not any issue for us. 

Our site at Minuteman.  Nice large site!

We had three goals while here and we met 2 of them.  First was easy, stay in MA so we could put our state decal on our map; done.  Second was to visit Salem MA as neither of us had been there and we wanted to see the witch stuff.  Third was to do a commercial tour of Boston.  We have both been to Boston a few times but have not really seen a lot of the sights in the city.

We had a family of turkeys wander through our site.  We counted 11 babies and 2 mothers.

So the Boston tour didn’t happen.  It didn't happen mostly because we just didn’t plan very well for it.  We were going to be doing it on a weekday so we would need to contend with rush hour traffic so we decided to take a train. 

Our first attempt failed due to not finding a place to park near the train station.  An internet blog site has said that we should avoid the closest station to us, Littleton MA, due to no parking and to use the Concord station.  We found out, too late, that there was more and easier parking at the closer station, Littleton.

Anyway, we tried again the next day but just couldn’t get it together in time to leave early enough and have time for the tour.  The train trip was about an hour and we needed half an hour just to get to the station.  The  2 hour Boston tour closed at 5 pm and we figured we would need 3-4 hours for the tour as we would probably stay longer at some of the sights. 

We also needed to contend with the train schedule itself. The trains were spaced out to the point that it was difficult to do a plan B. We were either in Boston way early, 9am, or too late, 3pm. By the time we were ready to leave we didn’t have enough time to make the train we wanted and the next one was too late for us to make the tour.  So we just didn’t do a Boston tour this time.

We did manage do the Salem tour though and it was great! We drove an hour to Salem MA to have dinner and to do the Hocus Pocus Haunted Salem walking tour. We also went to the witch dungeon museum.  The museum did a mock witch trial from the 1600s transcripts, very cool.

During the witch trial.

An actual piece of the building from the original 1600s witch jail. 

The walking tour started at 7 pm so we had dinner beforehand at the restaurant FINZ on the bay in Salem.  We both got pretty full so having a walking tour after was just what we needed.

Had to have lobster in New England!

The haunted Salem tour was pretty long as walking tours go, just over 2 hours!  

We can say that this walking tour was one of the best we have had in the USA.  The main reason it was so great was due to our tour guide, Susan Metzger.  She really brought the city of Salem alive for us.  She gave us interesting facts, intrigue, and history. And then she topped it off with a visit to the Salem Witch Trials memorial at dusk. The memorial bears witness to the 16 women and 4 men who lost their lives in that dark period of Salem’s history.  She gave us the good, the bad and the great of the city of Salem. Just can’t say enough about the tour she gave us.

Our tour guide, Susan.

Just something along the way in Salem that I thought was cool!

Statue of William Conant, the founder of Salem MA.

Where most of the witches were buried.

This spooky house is next to the witch grave yard.  It's for sale!

Interesting tidbit.  These gravestones are not on the actual graves.  In the old days of Salem people paid to be buried near the church and to remain for many, many years.  However, after some time, the church wanted to expand so they removed the tomb stones and put them in storage while they built on top of the bodies.  Later, the tomb stones were put in front of the church.

This is very dark picture of the memorial to the people who were accused of being witches and killed.  Very nice that this was done!

After the tour we had to drive an hour back to our site in the dark, not fun!  Before we left though, we got some ice cream and sat outside to enjoy it.  It was a great end to a great day before we made the long drive on unknown roads in the dark. We made it back and were safely in bed by a little before midnight.

That was that for Massachusetts!  Now, on to number 4 of the New England states, Vermont.

Stay tuned!