A weekend in Maine

Despite certain recent events, life has mostly been pretty good lately. Like last weekend, which we spent camping with friends in Mt. Blue State Park in Weld, ME.

For quite a while now -- I think it's at least 10 years -- a small group of folks from the local contradance community has been taking a camping trip over Labor Day Weekend. (This is an entirely different event from Dance Camp.) We started going on this trip about 5 years ago, and (with the exception of 2001, when we were in Iceland) we haven;t missed one since.

What happens is that about 12 folks rent 4 campsites in a campground in northern New England (all the others I've been to have been in Vermont, but we decided to try Maine this year just for variety). It's not always exactly the same people, although a core group seems to have formed consisting of CR (who originated the idea, as with so much else about the local gay folk dance community), CD, PR & JD (who seem, somewhat inadvertently, to have assumed the responsibility for organizing it). HK, and more recently me, jwg, and glass_diva.

Most of the waking time on this trip is devoted to preparing, eating, and cleaning up after meals. Our pattern is to turn one of the four campsites into a kitchen/dining area (moving the picnic tables form the other sites to this one), and distribute our tents in the other three. We always eat well; in fact, considering the limitations of open-fire cooking (and the relatively small surface area available), I'd say we produce some pretty fantastic meals.
CR does amazing things with eggs and veggies, various things get grilled for Saturday evening (we always bring about 4 pounds of salmon), and P' s fish stew is the highlight of Sunday night.

Oh, yes, there's a few hours in the afternoons to do things in the Great Outdoors if one is so inclined. Some people do road trips (we did one a couple of years ago, into Canada); some people like to go hiking (I've been talked into this a couple of times in the past, against my better judgement, and have sworn off); there's pretty much always a lake with canoe rental available. (P & J bring their own canoe; I suppose we could do that too, but it never seems to be worth the trouble.)

Considering early forecasts, we were pretty lucky with the weather -- especially jwg and I, who arrived early enough on Friday to get our tent set up before the rain arrived. It rained on and off through Friday night, then gradually cleared during the day Saturday; Saturday night was brilliantly clear, cloudless and moonless, and we wandered off in several groups to the lakeside to get a view unobstructed by trees of "Mars and stars". It's good for us city folks to be reminded now and again what a sky full of stars looks like. (Even in Gloucester we get a fair amount of light pollution, and our lot is so full of trees that we don't see much sky any more anyway.) Sunday was an absolutely perfect day -- blue sky, temperature in the low 70s. John and I did take a little canoe ride, turning back when we were ready, letting P & J (younger and stronger than we are) explore the northern end of the lake on their own.

And Saturday and Sunday nights were mercifully cold -- our sleeping bags are just too warm if the temperature doesn't drop below 55F.

You're probably wondering "Where are the pictures?" Well, for some unknown reason, although jwg brought his camera, he never once took it out of its case.

Anyway, it was a lovely time with a nice group of people, even if a couple of them are folks of whom I find a little goes a long way (no, not you, glass_diva). It's nice to get away from the rest of the world (mostly) for a few days now aand again.

Of course, there was ( the scary thing with the car )