A weekend in Maine

[rsc]

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:

No, not life-threatening scary, just really-annoying-inconvenience-threatening scary. After coming back from our canoe trip Sunday, with none of the other folks in our group around, we decided to drive to the ranger station at the campground entrance to pick up some more firewood; after we'd driven 100 yards or so there was a loud clunk and the car stopped, and wouldn't go into gear. A couple of guys who at least acted like they knew something about cars appeared from a nearby campsite, and peered under the hood and crawled under the chassis and decided that, yes, there was something screwy with the transmission linkage but they couldn't see what it was. So, I'm thinking, how wonderful, 200 miles from home (and a fair number of miles from anywhere much) with an undriveable car full of stuff on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend with no cell phone service. But somehow John found it possible to get the car into some gear (we think third) and moving, so we drove it to the ranger station and got the rangers to make some phone calls, from which we determined that the nearest mechanic, although open on Monday, probably wouldn't be able to look at it then, and the next nearest one was (not surprisingly) not answering the phone. The interesting thing was that on the way to the ranger station John absent-mindedly shifted into second, and the car responded just fine, and in fact worked perfectly well for the rest of the (fairly short) drive So we decided to leave it in the parking lot with the option of calling AAA on Monday. A little later, after some more thought, John suggested trying to drive it around the lot, and if it seemed to be behaving OK, to go ahead and pick up the firewood and bring it back to the campsite, inasmuch as it contained two coolers and several bags full of ingredients that were going to be needed for dinner. And once again the car behaved perfectly.

In the end, we decided to risk the drive home on Monday, with H following us until it was time to branch off to Gloucester, just so we wouldn't be stranded in case something went wrong. Nothing did; the car gave us no further trouble. It was due for its 120K service anyway, so John called the dealer on Tuesday, and we're bringing it in on Monday (the earliest available appointment), and not driving it in the interim. This is one time when we're glad we haven't implemented our plan to go back to being a one-car household.


...and ...

the sports news:
The one disadvantage of having access to neither cell-phone service nor newspapers (apart from unforeseen automotive issues) was the anticipated difficulty of finding out what was happening to the Red Sox, who were playing the Yankees at home. However, as it turned out, there were a couple of FM stations that carry Sox games within range of the park. Now, we weren't about to be so unsociable as to listen to all of every game, but this allowed us to check on how they were doing periodically, either on the car radio or using the walkman that I had foresightedly decided to bring -- although the latter required some creative maneuvering to get acceptable reception. So we got to hear the end of Friday night's game (which the Sox won); unfortunately we had enough leisure to listen to much of the latter parts of Saturday's and Sunday's games, which didn't go so well. Oh, well, it's better than if we had stayed home, in which case we probably would have watched every pitch. (Actually, if we hadn't known or assumed this trip was planned back when we were distributing tickets, we would probably have gone to Friday's game.)


...but in retrospect these things don't seem to matter much.

Comments

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Give it a try. This afternoon would be good -- they'll need all the help they can get against Roger.