New York City

A tour of the US isn't complete without a stop in New York City, even though we took the kids there for spring break several years back. This time we stayed for three nights at the Liberty Harbor RV park in New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan.. Check out the view of the Statue of Liberty from our site (OK, it was taken with a telephoto lens, but it is still pretty cool). We also have a great view of Manhattan from the dock about 100 yards down the hill. The downside is the closely packed accommodations, even tighter than Fishing Bridge in Yellowstone -- we could literally touch four other RVs from our narrow gravel campsite. Luckily most of the campers were from Canada, and since Monday was their Thanksgiving, they were all in a partying mood (we got free subway tickets and multiple drink offers!).

Here is Teressa's journal entry for our visit to the Big Apple: Gary and I ventured out to find the Home Depot up the street. It was the weirdest Home Depot I have ever seen. Because there is so much city around it, you have to drive off the main road on the left side to a ramp that enters a parking garage. If you miss it, you go through the Holland tunnel into NYC. We made it but had no time to think about whether our truck with BIKES STILL ON TOP would make it into the garage. We feel extremely fortunate that this Home Depot parking garage was apparently built to accommodate trucks or we might have had some unwanted air conditioning in our truck.

It was sunny and high 60’s this morning when we hopped the ferry from Jersey City to Wall Street. Gary has a keen sense of direction or a 6th sense, so he pointed his nose in the air and led us right to a public building where we could have coffee and hot chocolate and plan our morning. With the volatility of Wall Street lately, we wanted to check out the New York Stock Exchange. They will no longer let the public through their doors, but it was fun to watch the stock prices on the ticker tape and to see all the news crews and cameras set up out front. New York City’s finest are fully employed in that part of town too. We laughed when we saw some foreign tourist getting his photo taken with a couple of cops in riot gear garb rather than their usual uniforms.

Next stop was the discount theater ticket booth on John Street. There was quite a line there when we arrived, but it more than doubled in the next 10 minutes. Even with that, we were able to get tickets to our top two picks -- Spamalot and Mama Mia (of those that were available). All tickets were half of the box office price which was a darn good deal.

At that point, it was time for lunch, and we had a heck of a time getting to Little Italy. At the subway station, we bought our tickets and attempted to find the trains. However, after I ran my ticket through the activation machine, I attempted to walk through the turn style but grabbed it in the wrong place and ultimately locked myself on the wrong side of the entrance gate. I attempted to run the card again, but it is programmed not to allow you to do it again for a period of time to keep people from passing them off to their friends. Sheesh! So I had to go buy another ticket and finally made it to the other side. We headed to the trains and ours left just as I was coming down the stairs. Thank goodness the others hadn’t jumped on the train because I wouldn’t have made it. Then Gary yelled at me and I yelled at him and we all yelled at each other until the next train came which, unbeknown to us, was an express train. Therefore, we could not get off in a stop or two and ended up way beyond the Italian area. Eventually, of course, we did get there after a walk through Chinatown in which I was frequently accosted by street vendors thinking I needed a new handbag. I vowed that I would not return to NY looking like a tourist.

Ah, the Italian section! We selected Ristorante Da Nico for lunch because they had a garden/patio area where we could eat our pasta. Gary ordered their chicken spinach with white sauce pizza. It was good except that the white sauce was very strange…not much flavor. I had rigatoni in a red sauce. The sauce was excellent. Gary and I shared our meals. The kids had fettuccine alfredo and it is hard to not make well…

At that point, we returned to Jersey City for some R&R and to let Rocky out.

Back to New York at 5:30. We took the PATH train from Grove Street station (Jersey City) to 33rd St. in NYC. Changed trains. Took Metro to somewhere around 41st. Our theater was on 44th but Gary had Googled some restaurant sites for Thai food and we walked to a restaurant a few long blocks away. We haven’t had Thai food since Jackson, Wyoming. This little restaurant served Pad Thai similar to our favorite Portland restaurant, Siam. The other food was good too, and it was inexpensive and close to the theater.

We went to see Monty Python’s Spamalot with Clay Aiken. Gary and I didn’t know what to expect. Would the British humor be too dry for our kids or over their heads? Would it be too raunchy? But, it turned out to be very funny with great song and dance routines and wonderful talent. And, it was fun to see one of our American Idol faves on stage. There was some offbeat humor (and some off color humor), but Brian and Laura handled it well and---it was just a lot of fun.

The next day we journeyed back into the city around noon after the kids had completed a couple of hours of homework. We stopped at a cute Mexican restaurant in the theater district for a quick lunch before the play. Mama Mia was excellent, with great Abba music that brought back memories of younger days. After a little souvenir shopping we returned to the RV Park via the subway. There is no place like New York City -- Laura is ready to get a job on Broadway!
Subways back to Jersey City and bed.

Philadelphia, PA

Today we toured the City of Brotherly Love. Our journey started by automobile, with Brian driving us northeast from our campground in Clarksboro, New Jersey, to the train station in Woodcrest. There we boarded a Philadelphia bound PATCO train for just over $5 round trip apiece. It was a pleasant ride, and the best part was we didn’t have to search for parking downtown. The Philadelphia station was two blocks from the Independence Hall Visitor Center, where we secured tickets for a 12:45 tour. Since it was only 10:25, we investigated other activities and found a Philadelphia Duck Boat tour leaving at 10:30 – perfect timing. After a quick restroom break, we boarded our amphibious vehicle, donned our duck noise makers, and spent the next 90 minutes enjoying an educational scenic tour of downtown Philadelphia. Our driver looked like Simon Cowell from American Idols, but was much more hospitable! It was a great way to start the day.

The kids were hungry by the end of the duck boat tour, so we grabbed a quick snack at Dunkin Donuts (our first trip to the storied East Coast coffee institution) and sat on a bench on Market Street enjoying the sunshine. At 12:30 we queued up for our tour of Independence Hall. It was quite a humbling experience, standing in the same exact spots where the Continental Congress met, presidents Washington and Adams took their oaths of office, and the Declaration of Independence was signed. We were extremely fortunate to have a park ranger with degrees in history and anthropology entertain us an in-depth tour of Congress Hall, offering insights into the political climate of our new nation, especially President Washington’s role. Teressa and I are ready to go back to college again! A quick peek at the Liberty Bell completed our tour of Independence Mall.

In another case of “it’s a small world”, one of the people on our 12:45 tour was Howard Chang, a sales engineer from back in the early Webridge days. He brought his wife and two daughters into the city from New Jersey yesterday since they had not seen the Liberty Bell. What are the odds we would end up in town on the same day, on the same tour! It was fun to see him again (it’s been over 5 years).

When the tour ended we ducked into the Curtis Publishing Building (where Norman Rockwell once worked) to view “The Dream Garden”, a huge glass mosaic designed by Maxfield Parrish and executed by Tiffany Studios. Composed of 100,000 pieces of favril glass in 260 different colors, the tranquil garden scene is mesmerizing. In an attempt to snap ourselves back to reality, we jumped in a taxi and drove to Pat’s Cheese Steak restaurant for an original Philadelphia experience. We tried different combinations of onions, Cheeze Wiz, mushrooms, provolone and peppers. They were good, but we like Teressa’s French dip sandwiches better!

Another cab ride deposited us at the Philadelphia mint. Unfortunately it closed half an hour before we arrived, so we walked next door to view the graves of Ben Franklin and four other signers of the Declaration. At the bookstore on Chestnut Street the kids bought stickers for their National Park passport books, and stamped them with "Independence Hall". A short walk back to the train station, a twenty minute train ride, and a commute in Friday afternoon rush hour traffic delivered us back to the campground.

After a light dinner, we spent time pulling two ticks off Rocky. Research on the Internet suggested not using a match, instead using alcohol and tweezers to pull them out. Next time we’ll use a match or hot pin, as Rocky now has two tick heads firmly implanted under his skin. The alcohol did make Teressa and I feel better though! ;-)

Mystic, CT

We are staying at the KOA compground in North Stonybrook, CT. The facility is huge -- with space for hundreds of campers. Most of the full timers have left for the season, but there are still plenty of travelers here. Brian and Laura love the jumping pillow -- a trampoline like device that lets you bounce to your heart's content. Even big kids enjoy it!

The kids worked on homework this morning, and then we drove into Mystic to explore. We were craving hamburgers, so our first stop was “Five Guys and Fries”, reported to be one of the best burgers on the east coast. The food was excellent, especially the spicy hand cut curly fries from Rigby, Idaho! Five Guys and Fries is a chain, and the manager said they were coming soon to Oregon!

Our next stop was the small town of Stonington Village, sitting on a narrow peninsula jutting out into the ocean. Most of the buildings are several hundred years old, but all are in excellent condition. We stopped at the end of the peninsula to watch some fisherman on the jetty. There were a number of lobster pot buoys bobbing along the shore. From Stonington we headed south on Route 1 to Mystic – actually we headed almost straight west. This is hard to get comfortable with directions, as the Connecticut coast runs almost straight east and west (not north and south like most of us imagine)!

We parked downtown so we could browse the shops and view the harbor. The picture of the kids is from the original Mystic Pizza restaurant, made famous by the Julia Roberts movie of the same name. We were going to tour the Mystic Seaport museum, but spending $60 for an hour and 20 minutes didn’t seem like a good investment. Instead we stopped at a video store and rented two movies – Mystic Pizza and Groundhog day. The evening was a classic family movie night, complete with Teressa’s famous tortilla soup. It was fun for the kids to watch movies where they immediately recognized the filming locations.

North of Boston - Of Witches and Revolutions

The heater was on most of the night in the RV, as temperatures plunged into the 30s in New England. We spent the last two days at the Minuteman RV Park in Littleton, MA, approximately 25 miles northwest of Boston.

Sunday afternoon, after getting the trailer set up in the new campground, Brian drove us to Salem to visit the Witch Museum. While the facility is old and doesn’t take advantage of current audio visual equipment or computer animation, it provides a good historical account of the hysteria around witches in early New England. Ann Putnam and a group of teenage girls, bored and looking for some excitement, convinced most of the town that they were being controlled by witches. Unfortunately their accusations led to the hanging of 19 innocent people, and hundreds of others going to jail. Another man was crushed to death by stones. The museum makes a interesting case for the repetition of this pattern of hysteria throughout history – the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, McCarthyism, and perhaps even our current financial crisis.

From Salem we headed north to the Philips Academy at Andover. Recognized as one of the best prep schools in America, Andover sits on a beautiful college-like campus, offering its 1200 students a rigorous academic experience. Peter Schock, a family friend from Portland, graduated from Andover last year. Brian’s friend Rona, who attended middle school with him at Meadow Park, is in her sophomore year at Andover. She was an excellent tour guide on a crisp autumn afternoon. After touring the campus, we walked into downtown Andover and enjoyed brick oven pizza for dinner at Bertucci’s, which was recommended by several friends from Boston. It was excellent!

Monday morning the kids did homework, then we drove to a UPS store and sent in a portfolio for one of Laura’s classes. The rest of the day was spent exploring the events leading up to the Revolutionary War, and many of the authors and poets who wrote about it. We started at the North Bridge in Concord, where on April 19, 1775, the Minutemen first fired on His Majesty’s redcoats. It was surreal, standing on this graceful bridge, watching the river meander slowly underneath, trying to imagine what it must have been like that chaotic day. Nobody knows who fired the first shot, but the event changed the course of history.

We retraced the events of April 19th, driving to Lexington where the redcoats had killed several colonists earlier that day, and later were engaged in fierce fighting as they retreated all the way back to Boston. Along the way we viewed the spot by the river where Paul Revere was captured and detained the night before as he alerted the colonists that the “British were coming”. The visitor center in Lexington had an excellent half hour presentation recasting the events of that fateful day.

The Lexington and Concord areas also contain the homes of many famous American writers and poets. We drove past Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home, and enjoyed reading his Concord Hymn about the “shot heard round the world”. We stopped and walked around Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, made famous by her book “Little Women”. In Concord we made a stop at Walden Pond, and viewed a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s house, at 10 x 12, no bigger than the size of today’s’ bedrooms! Teressa and the kids had fun “playing” with Thoreau’s statue (see the attached pictures). We feel humbled walking in the shadows of legends!

Derry, New Hampshire

We left our campground near Portland, Maine around noon yesterday, and drove south along the Maine coast. Unlike the Oregon coast, it is almost impossible to find any place to park an RV, so we viewed the towns along the way from the truck, with little peaks at the ocean here and there. Kennebunkport was a cute little town centered around a protected bay with interesting shops lining the streets. Our route was much slower than the freeway, but we avoided part of the toll road. How toll roads make sense, I am at a loss to explain, but at least Maine has a wide lane on the right for RVs at every toll booth.

Arriving in Kittery around 2, we did a little shopping at the factory outlet malls. Laura found a pair of running shoes that fit her on sale, so the stop was successful. We continued south along the coast into New Hampshire, and then cut across the state to our campground in Derry. I found the campground on-line – it is not listed in any of the travel directories. That should have been a warning. It’s not a bad place, adjacent to a golf course and tucked into a thick wood forest. It’s just that most of the inhabitants look like they have been living here in their trailers for years. Plastic pink flamingos and flowers grace many of the flower pots, and Christmas lights hang from the majority of the trailers. Most folks drive around in golf carts and look like they are all related. You can even here the faint sound of banjo music at night (OK, just kidding about that!).

We set up camp before dark and then drove up to Manchester to meet one of our high school friends and her family for dinner. Janet Eck graduated from Helena High with a 4.0 and attended MIT and Harvard. She married Elliott Bloom, a research engineer for a medical device company here in New Hampshire. They have one child, Maya, who is 13 and like Laura, attends 8th grade. We spent over three hours at a Mexican restaurant eating and catching up on the last 30 years. We had a great evening reminiscing!

I’ll end today with a short story I wrote after my morning walk with Rocky (our Pomeranian) today.

Rocky’s Obsession

Everyone, it seems, has an obsession. For Rocky, it is chipmunks. To humans, chipmunks are cute little furry creatures, daintily darting among the trees, filling the forest with their friendly chatter. To a dog, they are the ultimate squeaky toy!

We awoke this morning at our campsite in Derry, New Hampshire, tucked deep in a thick wood. Rocky’s head was filled with the chirping of dozens of chipmunks as we started our morning walk. Their sound reverberated all around us, but their presence remained hidden. Was this really the ultimate chipmunk hunting grounds, or was he slowly losing his sanity, just imagining the sounds ringing in his ears?

Primordial instincts kicked in, as he rolled in a plethora of odoriferous substances discovered on the forest floor, trying to mask his smell, just as his ancestors had done for generations. Alas, stealth mode didn’t work – the chirping continued, but with no visible sign of the mystical creatures. Paranoia was starting to set in, as he dashed wildly back and forth towards the sounds echoing in his head.

Ultimately he accepted defeat and returned with me to the RV, exhausted and confused. He slunk to the window by the kitchen table and stared deeply into the forest, hoping to detect any movement that might return his sanity. After long anxious minutes, he suddenly exploded in wild barks and howls. There on a rock, just outside the window, sat a fat chipmunk sunning himself.

The chipmunk taunted Rocky, as if knowing the window was an impenetrable barrier. He stuffed his cheeks with nuts just feet from Rocky’s cold black nose pressed hard against the pane. Rocky whimpered incessantly, his ultimate prize so close, yet untouchable. Paranoia gone, obsession rekindled!

Portland, Maine

After touring Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park earlier in the week, we traveled down the coast to our campground in Scarborough, just south of Portland. We stopped in Freeport to visit the LL Bean Flagship campus. Parking the RV was a challenge, which seemed surprising since tourists should be their main source of revenue. Following the “RV Parking” signs led us to a dead end – not a fun experience with a 34 foot trailer. We managed to back out and find parking close to a high school, not far from the LL Bean campus. An unsuccessful pass through their factory outlet left us no choice but to pay top dollar at the main store – go figure! Laura found a new rain coat (she hasn’t had one on the trip), and I invested in a pair of slip on rubber clogs for walking Rocky on wet mornings. Teressa and Brian stuck out, except for cake and a muffin at the coffee bar!

Our campground is located a half mile from Old Orchard Beach in a grove of trees next to a marsh estuary. We selected a site in the new section of the park, with wide drive ways and open vistas. The temperature dipped into the low 40s the last two nights, which required us to break down and use the furnace to keep warm. We are also using the shower in our trailer, since the first morning’s experience in the 40 degree RV Park bathroom was a little too invigorating.

As Teressa declared yesterday morning, “This must be Portland because it’s raining and the wind is blowing!” Brian drove us into downtown Portland, not an easy feat even with a GPS. It reminded us of Portland, Oregon, with its quaint downtown area on the waterfront. The kids really wanted to find shirts with “Portland Maine” logos, so we spent an hour scouring the downtown area before both were successful. Brian scored a great deal, picking up the sweatshirt you see in the picture for $20. It was a fun experience, as we were convinced the shop keeper was the sister of one of our good friends, Karin Schock (same voice and mannerisms). She was very helpful, giving us directions to the Portland Head Light, and a favorite local ice cream parlor (are you picking up a pattern here?). We were very fortunate that the rains stopped as we approached the light house. The setting sun illuminating the light house provided a stark contrast to the dark rain clouds on the far horizon.

Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, Maine

We finally broken Internet and cell phone silence this week! The RV park we stayed in near Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park didn’t have Internet access, and our Verizon phones (and the Sea2C router) couldn’t get a reliable signal, so we didn’t have cell phone service either. Luckily it is only the third time on the trip (the others were Fishing Bridge campground in Yellowstone Park, and Ontario, Canada). It is amazing how much we rely on the Internet – researching campgrounds, communicating with friends, keeping up on world and local news. We are glad to be connected to the world again!

The campground we stayed in near Bar Harbor operates on a first come, first serve basis -- they don’t accept reservations! The good news is they let you drive around and pick out your own site. After selecting a pull through site at the top of the hill with a partial view of the Ocean, we cooked dinner and plotted our strategy for the next day in the park. The weather gods were finally cooperating, as it looked like the following day would be dry for a change.

The morning dawned bright and sunny as predicted, a welcome change from all the rain we experienced in New Hampshire and the drive across Maine. The kids worked on homework for a couple of hours, and then Brian drove us into Bar Harbor in search of clam chowder. The town was buzzing with two cruise ships anchored in the harbor. We found a place to park and did some window shopping along main street. Teressa asked one of the shop keepers for a recommendation on the best clam chowder in town, and we ended up at the Thirsty Whale. The “chowdah” was excellent, with a thick cream base and a hint of garlic!

After lunch we drove to the visitor center at the entrance to Acadia National Park. The kids got their passport stickers and stamps, and we watched a short movie about the park. Acadia is the only national park where the land was given to the government by private citizens. That accounts for some of the odd shaped boundaries between public and private lands. We spent the next four hours circumnavigating the park. One of the highlights was Sand Beach, the only sand beach in the park, made up mostly of crushed animal shells. Laura accurately described its feel as that of sawdust. We stopped at Jordan Pond and did a short hike down to the lake along the carriage trails. For a finale, we drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain (1600 feet) as the sun was setting and enjoyed a 360 degree view of the park. As they pointed out in the movie at the visitor center, Acadia doesn’t have any “must see” signature attractions like many of the other national parks, but the overall package is impressive!

We ended the day back in Bar Harbor at a local pizza parlor. There we met a group of retired folks on a tour from Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia. They were interested in our trip and gave us more suggestions on things to see and do around DC. There are no shortage of opportunities!