Month: September 2019

This is our first new blog post since September 2017, when we completed our second camping trip from N.H. to the west coast and back.  Between then and now we’ve been on a few short trips in “Vagabond.”  The longest of those was two and a half weeks to Quebec’s Chic Choc Mountains and Gaspé Peninsula and the east coast of New Brunswick in 2018.  Other trips included weekends to the White Mountains in N.H, the Connecticut Lakes region of N.H., and the Thousand Islands region along the St. Lawrence River in upstate N.Y., as well as two weeks to the Virginia & D.C. area.  Now we have begun our third long (multiple-month) post-retirement trip.  This time we’ll be out for 72 days, headed as far west as Colorado before exploring for the first time six states in the south-central region as we make our way back to N.H. before winter sets in.

The map of the states on the side of our camper has stickers for each of the lower 48 states.  Our self-imposed criteria for earning each new state sticker are to camp in the state, go for a hike in it, and go for a bike ride in it.  Then we noticed that the map also has stickers for the five Great Lakes, and had to decide upon qualifications for putting them on the map.  We came up with camping in the watershed area of the lake, plus at least two of the following three activities:  hiking in the lake’s watershed, biking in the lake’s watershed, and swimming in the lake.  The two Great Lakes for which we had not previously earned a sticker, Ontario and Erie, were our first goals on this year’s trip.

13 Aug: We found a very nice swimming and picnicking area at New York’s Fair Haven Beach State Park west of Oswego for our Lake Ontario swim.  The campground in that park looked very attractive, so we would like to camp there on some future trip.  Continuing west to Lake Erie, we then swam and camped at Evangola State Park.

14 Aug:  Traveling from New York to Ohio, we stopped at Erie, Penn., to visit the Erie Maritime Museum.  From its earliest days, Erie was important to both commercial and military activities on the Great Lakes because of its large, well-sheltered harbor.  Among the many excellent displays there were several about the War of 1812 naval battle won by the fleet of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (“Don’t Give Up The Ship”) to establish control of the upper Great Lakes over the British.  Late in the afternoon, we went on a sail on the schooner Lettie G. Howard, which was originally built in Massachusetts and sailed for many years as a commercial fishing vessel.  We passengers participated by helping the crew hoist the large sails.  A perfect sailing breeze made for a thoroughly enjoyable sail.

15-24 Aug:  A keystone in scheduling our trip itinerary was a weekend reunion of Amy’s cousins and their families at the summer camp that was formerly Amy’s grandparents’ farm in rural Holmes County northeast of Columbus, Ohio.  For nine days before the reunion, we traveled around Ohio seeing other cousins and friends, riding our bikes on scenic bike trails, and visiting archaeological and other attractions.

First we stayed two nights and a day with Amy’s cousin Ann and her husband Floyd.  Their son Richard, who works with his dad, gave us a very informative tour of their 24-acre nursery and its facilities.  They propagate a wide variety of shrubs and trees, specializing on the family Ericaceae, which includes rhododendrons and azaleas.  Both Floyd and Rich did their graduate work at Ohio State, and they have recently done some very interesting studies on a little-known species of fungus, which has a symbiotic relationship with rhododendrons (valuable knowledge for successfully growing healthy plants).

We next camped for four nights at Caesar Creek State Park, between Columbus and Cincinnati.  While there, we saw fossils on a hike along the creek, biked on the Little Miami Scenic Trail, and visited the Fort Ancient State Memorial.  The LMST is a paved rail trail forming part of the Ohio to Erie Trail, which extends from Cincinnati to Cleveland.  The two sections on which we biked were very pleasant and well-shaded. “Fort Ancient” was probably not a fort.  It appears to have been more of a social, trading, and ceremonial gathering place.  It is a ridge-top enclosure built by people of the Hopewell culture, who lived in the area during about 200 BC to 400 AD.  Located on a bluff above the Little Miami River, it is surrounded by an earthen wall about 3.5 miles long with dozens of gaps that provided access to the interior and would have precluded military defense.  It was built in three major stages over about 400 years.  Small mounds inside coincide with astronomical alignments.  The museum on site has excellent displays explaining Ohio history and prehistorical cultures.  The next day we were treated to a fine dinner by Paul’s distant cousin Mike and his wife Michelle in the Golden Lamb restaurant in Lebanon, founded in 1803.  The Golden Lamb has hosted 12 U.S. Presidents, from as early as John Quincy Adams to as recent as George W. Bush.

On the way from Caesar Creek to the Harris family reunion, we visited friends Lisa & Lisle in Delaware, Ohio, and another distant cousin of Paul’s, Ellen, and her husband George.  Mike, Ellen, and Paul all are descended from John and Jane Stitt, who raised 10 children in County Down, northern Ireland, and immigrated to America in the mid-1800s.  While visiting Ellen and George in Columbus, we stopped for ice cream a Jeni’s ice cream shop, established by the author of our favorite ice cream recipe book.  While camping in Ohio, we noticed several trees unfamiliar to us New Englanders, particularly nut trees like walnuts, buckeyes, and hickory species we don’t see in N.H.  In the morning before the Harris cousins met at the reunion, we rode our bikes on the Holmes County Trail, a newly finished section of the Ohio to Erie bike trail.

The family reunion was well attended, with all but two of the 14 cousins of Amy’s generation present, along with many of their families.  The weather was perfect for strolling about the former farm and reminiscing about the times they would visit their grandparents there.

 

25-28 Aug:  We left before the main breakfast on the last morning of the reunion to begin our long drive to Colorado, so Amy could arrive in time for the biennial rug hooking conference in Denver that she is attending and exhibiting in.  That meant four straight days of driving, with little time to stop to sightsee along the way.  We stayed at three campgrounds we had stayed in before, conveniently close to I-70 a day’s drive apart.  At the first one, Hickory Run State Park in Indiana, we had time before dark for a short walk on a hiking trail through a scenic sandstone canyon.

On the second day, we stopped for lunch at Vandalia, which was the second capital of Illinois (before Springfield), where Abraham Lincoln served two terms as a state representative early in his career.  The old statehouse is still there and now houses an Abraham Lincoln museum.  Vandalia was also the western terminus of the National Road, which was built in the early 1800s to facilitate travel west from Cumberland, Md., to what was the “frontier” in those days.

We began our third day by stopping to read the excellent historical panels at a kiosk beside the Katy Trail State Park in Missouri.  We had camped near the ruins of the roundhouse turntable at the site formerly known as Franklin Junction.  Franklin was established in 1816 near the western frontier of the U.S., five years before Missouri became a state.  In 1821, wagon traffic began from Franklin to Santa Fe, New Mexico, along what became the Santa Fe Trail—an important freight route until 1880, when a railroad finally reached Santa Fe.  Our fourth day was all driving, and we arrived at our daughter Lowry’s in late afternoon for a fun reunion with our granddaughter Corwyn, who had just turned three a few days ago.

28 Aug-1 Sep:  Three is certainly an age of rapidly expanding horizons, and video chats are not an adequate substitute for personal contact over several days.  We so enjoyed seeing how much Corwyn has learned since we saw her in November and how she is developing her own personality and ability for independent imaginative play.  We read stories, played hide and seek, and generally had a great time together.

Amy thoroughly enjoyed the rug hooking conference, including a workshop in needle punching, a technique new to her.  Some very impressive hooking was on display in the exhibit area of the conference, including Amy’s Vail Pass tapestry, which we hung in Lowry and Kyle’s living room after the conference ended.  Two of Amy’s Monday-night craft group friends and another family member of one of them had also come out to the conference, so including all four husbands we filled a table of eight at the banquet.  At the auction following the dinner, we were entertained by some very spirited bidding on certain items (as we sat on our wallets).

The day after the hooking conference ended, we were joined by N.H. friends Nancy and Bill and also Kyle’s parents Jim and Cheryl for a big turkey dinner cooked by Lowry.

2-3 Sep:  Lowry, Kyle, and Corwyn came up to RMNP for a day trip with us, then returned home while we camped overnight and went for a hike the next day before returning to their house.  This gave us a chance to explore parts of the park we had not been to before.  On the first day we all went for a short hike after setting up and having lunch at Aspenglen, a small and attractive campground in the northeast part of the park.  We soon got up into a nice subalpine meadow with nice views.  We then drove up Trail Ridge Road, which is only open in the summer and is the only road between the eastern (Estes Park) and western (Grand Lake) park entrances.  Several miles are above treeline, which is about 11,000 feet in this part of the Rockies.  We watched a herd of elk pass by as we neared the Alpine Visitor Center.  We hiked from the visitor center to the top of a hill, a little above 12,000 feet elevation.  Snowfields clung to the ridges in sheltered places.

The next day the two of us hiked up Deer Mountain, which has an excellent view of a large flat meadow below (Moraine Park) with the park’s highest mountain, Longs Peak, in the distance behind it.  A nice young couple from northeastern Colorado walked most of the way up with us and told us of some good hiking places.