Camping and having fun can be hard work! This past week we met Glen, Barb, Cody, Patrick and Bryce and one of their friends, Derrick, at the State Park at Clear Lake California. The first two days were rainy, but that went away and we had lovely sunshine and temperatures up to the mid seventies for the rest of the week. Continue reading A Busy Week
Tag Archives: canoing
Sailing on Lake Hartwell
We are now in South Carolina. We are camped on a lake called Lake Hartwell. It is in the west end of South Carolina. It is a man made lake, Corps of Engineers, and it has some 900 miles of convoluted shoreline. This is a lake made for our schooner rigged canoe. This time you will just have to visit the web site to get a good look at Gary walking the schooner rigged canoe to the water. It is balanced on the bicycle trailer, and you can clearly see the double masts of the schooner rig. Also you can see Judy’s autumn colors reflections photo.
We spent a couple hours on the water and paddled about two miles this time. Our trip was very tranquil. We were able to observe a Great Blue Heron as we quietly paddled on this warm sunny afternoon. He didn’t seem to mind us shadowing him and he periodically flew up ahead of us and watched us glide by again. The autumn colors are beginning to develop nicely around the lake. We did observe that the beach houses are spaced very closely along the shore, and each house has a dock. Most docks have a speed boat or a party barge. In addition many docks have two or three “Personal Watercraft.” We only saw one “Bass Boat.” I would imagine that the intensity of the cacophony of buzzing boats makes it tough for the devoted fisherpersons. But on a quiet autumn weekday there was nothing moving except ourselves. It was magical.
We will spend a couple more days here, and then we will flirt with the big urban sprawl of Atlanta. We are going to a fairground campout in Marietta Georgia for a Bluegrass festival a week from Friday. Gary has been faithfully playing the guitar every day and teaching himself to pick melodies with the computer providing the accompaniment.
Judy is just as busy creating quilts and wall hangings for the church. So you see that we keep ourselves busy and entertained. By day we are always exploring our surroundings and in the evenings we create and practice.
We do enjoy getting comments back from these Blogs, and we like to hear what is going on with our friends and relatives back home. Do remember that if for any reason you wish to be dropped from our mailing, just send back a reply. You can always catch up later by checking out our web page.
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2010 update: You can click on the rss feed and set up to receive notifications whenever a new blog appears.
Time to wish everyone a good evening and send this on its way.
Love to all from Gary and Judy
Androscoggin River:
This river, which enters Main from New Hampshire about half-way up the Maine-New Hampshire border, is so beautiful that we decided to float the river in our canoe. The campground where we are staying in Bethel Maine has a drop-off service. They take you and your canoe or kayak, (or theirs,) ten miles upriver and drop you off. The river is about 50 yards wide in most places. It is placid enough for amateurs to handle, but it is not without its thrills. In some of the chutes you get to going over five miles per hour and of course you have to watch out for the “V” shaped wakes that mark submerged rocks.
It took us about three hours to make our way down river, including a lunch stop about half way down. The river is very interesting, for there are over a dozen islands along the way. You can pick either channel so you could float this river section several times and see new scenery every time. The trees are just now starting to show their fall colors. The temperature outside our window was 34 degrees this morning. It was in the high sixties for our trip. We think the peak colors will be in about a week.
At least now we have good justification for hauling our canoe 9,000 miles across the country. Right now I am thinking that I will be feeling some canoe paddling muscles that haven’t been used for a long time when I wake up tomorrow morning.
This campground has been a real haven in a storm. I finally decided that the computer was never going to be fully healed after our virus attack. I tried backing everything up and then I wiped the disk clean and started over from zero. The campground has DSL service and a connection to their LAN. I spent more than a day hooked to their internet connection downloading all of the Windows service packs and updates. I only lost a couple of important things, and I am still working on a way to retrieve some of that. Anyway all of my really important programs are fully functional. Hooray!
Here is a photo of the Androscoggin River. Bye for now and love to all from Gary and Judy in Bethel Maine.
Dust and Mosquitoes:
We spent the last week on a lake near Yuma Arizona on the Colorado River called Mittry Lake. The living was easy, the rent was cheap, (free) and we made a whole passel of new friends. Continue reading Dust and Mosquitoes:
The Broken Record:
I guess records are made to be broken, but this is ridiculous. Here we are in the middle of the Sonora Desert, in Quartzsite Arizona. At this moment there is lightning flashing and thunder rolling, and the rain is pelting down. There is an inch of water all about the coach, and the wind is whistling around the corners. Continue reading The Broken Record: