Flashback

I saw a news release last week that the popular campustown bar, Kam's, in Champaign was closing.

Friday afternoons, roommates, nickel hotdogs, longnecks, noisy crowd, Pork and the Havana Ducks performing, U. of I. football players as bouncers.

I may have spent some time there in my college days.

Still thankful for God's mercy and grace.

Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
Galations 5:21

Vermont

As we traveled from the Maine coast through New Hampshire and into Vermont, we crossed over the Appalachian Trail several times.  I would have liked to have stopped and did some hiking on it, but we were on a tight schedule.  We took a two lane road most of the way, instead of following the GPS route that was mostly interstate.  It was a beautiful drive through the mountains and the quaint villages.  Each village has a town green and a steepled church just like in the calendar pictures.  We arrived in Castleton Saturday evening just in time for the Clarendon Church's Sunday School picnic evening meal at Lake Bomoseen.

After the picnic, we stopped at a small farm owned by a church member (Old Gates Farm) and bought some maple syrup to take home with us.
We stayed with Phil and Sara on their beautiful Vermont farm.  It is a mixture of pasture, cropland, and timber.  I got to help Phil a little bit with his calves, and he gave me a tour of the farm and farmstead.

Sunday we attended the Clarendon church which meets in the Grange Hall.  We enjoyed meeting the small group that worships there, along with the visitors that were there from Rockville.

After church, we changed clothes and were back on the road again.
We made a pilgrimage to The Vermont Country Store, a famous mail order catalog store.  I don't think we ended up buying anything there!

It was raining Monday when we stopped in Plymouth Notch, the birthplace and boyhood home of  Calvin Coolidge.  The town is unchanged and preserved from when he was sworn in as our 30th President in 1923.  The site encompasses 600 acres and 12 or 13 buildings.  Calvin moved away to attend college and then entered a law practice in Massachusetts before getting involved in politics.  But, he continued to come home regularly to Plymouth Notch to spend time in the family home and work on the farm until his death in 1933.  Calvin's dad and some other dairy farmers started a cheese factory in the Plymouth Notch in 1890.  It is the second oldest cheese factory in America, and it still makes cheese today with the 1890 recipe.  We bought some to bring home with us.

The summer White House in the dance hall above the Coolidge Store.

The Coolidge family still has two houses and a farm on the outskirts of Plymouth Notch.

Coolidge is buried in a very simply marked grave in the town cemetery.

Our next stop was Hildene, the Lincoln family estate.  Robert Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln's only child who survived to adulthood.  He was a Captain in Grant's army, a lawyer in Chicago, Secretary of War in two administrations, Ambassador to the U.K., and finally the President of the Pullman Car Company.  Robert purchased a large acreage in the Southern Vermont mountains and built a home there. The last of Abraham Lincoln's descendants died there in 1978, and the house is now open to the public.  It is still furnished with Lincoln family furniture and belongings.  There is also a fully restored Pullman Palace car on display on the property.

The beautiful Vermont countryside on a foggy, rainy day.

In Manchester, we made a stop at the Orvis flagship store.  They are a famous fly fishing and outfitting company.  Their products were a little pricey for us, so we didn't spend any money there.  They had indoor and outdoor trout ponds, a fly fishing school, and a rod and reel factory on the premises.

Vermont and New Hampshire are dotted with covered bridges.  We managed to see three of them in Vermont before we started heading back West.

As we traveled toward home across Western New York, we followed the Erie Canal off and on, and crossed it a time or two.  Here is one of the lock and dams on the canal that we saw at a park/rest area.

A map of our travels through the North East.

As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.
Proverbs 25:25

And carry these ten cheeses unto the captain of their thousand, and look how thy brethren fare, and take their pledge.
1 Samuel 17:29

Acadia

Saturday evening of our Rockville weekend, Joe grilled Leg of Lamb, and they had some couples in for a meal with us.  After church on the Sunday, Joe and Sandy took us on a quick driving tour around the area. We drove through the cemetery, Oakridge Dairy, Country Pure's juice plant, and Kloter Farms. After we changed clothes and said farewell, we started our journey to the Maine coast.  Our first stop was to be at the Kittery Trading Post, but it was closed by the time we arrived. We kept driving until we reached Freeport, Maine, where we decided to spend the night.  Freeport is home to L.L.Bean and their flagship store, which happens to be open 24/7.

In the morning we continued our drive up the coast, stopping to visit a lighthouse, eat at Shaw's Fish and Lobster Wharf, and enjoy the rocky coast scenery.  We got to the Bar Harbor area late afternoon and checked into our cabin at Hinkley's Dreamwood Cottages.  The resort is quaint, old style Maine and a little rustic, but the cabin was clean, comfortable, and suited our needs.  We were often surprised by acorns falling on the roof, deck or our van during our stay.

We spent the rest of the week in and around Acadia National Park.  Acadia was the first National Park East of the Mississippi River; formerly Sieur de Monts National Monument, proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916.  The park was renamed Acadia National Park in 1929.  Most of the park is on Mount Desert Island, and includes about half of the Island.  It receives about 3.5 million visitors a year, and being one of the smaller parks by size, it can be very crowded during peak season.  Fortunately we visited in a lull period.  We visited the park's attractions, hiked, picnicked, climbed mountains, explored the small coast villages, relaxed, and ate good food.

Lemonade and popovers at Jordan Pond House. 

We drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain and hiked around the top.  Cadillac Mountain is the highest point on the North Atlantic seaboard, and is the first place in the U.S. that you can see the sunrise, fall through spring. We didn't bother to get up early enough for the sunrise! While hiking around on top of Cadillac, I met a Park Ranger/Forest Service intern who happened to be from Tremont. She had just graduated from Monmouth College and had had Fred W. as a history professor.
The mountains in Acadia are not the Rocky Mountains, but they were fun to climb and gave beautiful views of the park, ocean, and harbors. I climbed The Beehive, Acadia, Penobscot, Gorham, and South Bubble Mountains.  The old farmer's wife, despite the pain from having an emergency wisdom tooth extraction prior to leaving home, climbed Gorham with me and accidentally climbed the South Bubble also.

Looking down on Sand Beach.

Bubble rock.

Bar Harbor in the distance.

On our rainy day, we drove to the eastern tip of Maine and across the border into Canada to Campobello Island and toured Franklin Roosevelt's summer cottage.  Franklin spent his summers on Campobello from his childhood, eventually owning his own cottage.  In 1939, after Franklin contracted Polio, he was unable to visit his "beloved Island" much, but Eleanor and children continued using it every summer until her death in 1962.  The family then deeded it to the U.S. and Canadian governments.  The cottage and area are now a part of Roosevelt Campobello International Park.

We ate our share of lobster while in Maine.  I had grilled lobster, lobster roll, and lobster chowder.  We learned that for the early settlers and Native Americans, lobster was so plentiful and easy to catch in the tide pools (by hand or net), that it was considered poor mans food!  Lobster was probably served at the first Thanksgiving.  Today, Maine is the largest lobster producing state in the nation.  There are about 6427 licensed lobster-men (and women) with a annual harvest of about 276.5 million pounds of lobster.

We ate at this unique restaurant twice. It had indoor and outdoor seating, with a mostly outdoor kitchen.  They kept a fire under the lobster pots all day so they were ready to boil lobster at all times.

A lobsterman's wharf in a fishing harbor full of lobstering boats.

The iconic Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse.

At the end of the week we bid farewell to the coast and started our western travels across Maine, New Hampshire, and into Vermont.

And the border shall go down to Jordan, and the goings out of it shall be at the salt sea: this shall be your land with the coasts thereof round about.

Numbers 34:12

History

Dunkin' Donuts was founded in Quincy Massachusetts in 1950.  Almost every town in the New England states has a Dunkin' in it.  Fast Food restaurants were sometimes hard to find in the quaint towns of the Northeast, but there was always a Dunkin' nearby!  Even McDonald's were rare outside of the large cities, which we seem to have everywhere around here.

The first part of our trip was mostly history.  Our first stop was in Plymouth where the Mayflower brought the Pilgrims.  The replica Mayflower was not in the port while we were there, but we visited the local museum and saw the rock.

From Plymouth we headed North to the South side of Boston and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.  It was a very nice and interesting museum, but much smaller than many of the Presidential museums we have been to.  Then I realized that he was only President for two and a half  years!  Everyone my age and older remembers exactly where they were when they heard that President Kennedy was shot.  One of the exhibits that I particularly enjoyed was the multimedia presentation about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  That must have been a very tense time that I missed out on at the time being too young to understand or follow what was going on.

J.F.K.'s sailboat, the Victura, which he sailed as often as he could in the Cape Cod waters.

We spent a whole day in the downtown Boston historical districts.  We drove in and parked downtown and drove back out again and were never sure where we were going and how we got back out.  We were using a Garmin and Google maps app and still we were confused most of the time.  The streets are narrow, winding, and poorly marked.  The good thing was that the drivers were very courteous and patient, unlike most big cities.  After we parked we hopped on a trolley for a tour of all the historical highlights.  We later walked the Freedom Trail through the city and toured several of the old buildings.  The Freedom Trail starts at Boston Common and passes old cemeteries where patriots and founding fathers are buried, many historical buildings used during the revolutionary war, Paul Revere's home, the Old North Church (one if by land, two if by sea), Bunker Hill, and the wharf where "Old Ironsides" is docked.

Statue of Paul Revere with the Old North Church in the background.

Paul Revere's house.

Very interesting and unusual to stroll through cemeteries with graves dating back to the 16 and 1700's.

The USS Constitution.

 The Bunker Hill Monument with a statue of Col. William Prescott ("don't shoot 'til you see the whites of their eyes") in front of it.

View of Boston harbor from the top of the Bunker Hill monument (after climbing all 294 steps!).

From Boston we drove up to Salem and visited Nathaniel Hawthorne's birthplace and the House of Seven Gables which inspired the famous novel that he wrote.  Hawthorne was born in the red house in 1750, and often visited his relatives, the Ingersolls, who owned the house with seven gables when he was growing up.

From Salem, we headed to the Lexington/Concord area where the Minute Man National Historic Park is located.  This is the area where Paul Revere rode on his midnight ride.  The British first fired on the colonists at the Lexington Green, but the colonists first fired on the British at Concord's North Bridge, and then chased the British back to Boston on the "Battle Road Trail".

Next we stopped at Wayside house.  This house witnessed the American Revolution as it sits on the road from Lexington to Concord, but also at times was the home of three famous authors' families; the Hawthornes, the Alcotts, and the Lothrops.

Orchard House, Louisa May Alcott's house.

Our last stop on this part of our trip was to Walden Pond.  I hiked around the pond to the site of Henry David Thoreau's cabin made famous in his book, Walden.  I took a picture of him in front of his cabin checking his text messages!

This part of our trip was a good refresher course on the early history of our nation and many of the events and people that shaped the freedoms and blessings we enjoy today.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12:2