MOVIN’ RIGHT ALONG………

We left Williamsburg, Virginia three days ago and are now 903 miles west in Meridian Mississippi. Not bad traveling time for the last three days! And, only 1600 miles (approximately) away from our home in Sun City. YIKES!!

This type of traveling is not our favorite – up at 6am, on the road before 8am, 6 hours of driving (with usually a stop for gas and two other stops at rest areas for a morning stretch and a short afternoon lunch break before pulling into our RV spot for the night.) Depending on traffic, road and weather conditions, it can be a long and tiring day. But with our sights set on home, we choose to keep on moving. As I indicated in the last update, our sight-seeing for this year has come to an end and home is our goal.

The first day out, we stopped at an RV park just off the freeway in Dillon, South Carolina (just across the state line from North Carolina) and got a pull thru spot. We paid half price ($16) for a night’s stay on a Camp Club USA rate. On the second day we spent the night in the Covington, Georgia Wal-Mart parking lot (for free!) Tonight we will be at another RV park, again paying half price for the site on a Passport America rate. The reason I mention these financial details is not to brag about how frugal we are with our money…..even though we do try to make a buck last as long as possible! It is more for information to you “would-be” RVers or for those of you who have done some RV camping and paid full price for your sites every time.

Camp Club USA is something you can join through Camping World, and Passport America is another discount option for RV travelers. The annual dues for both are nominal and for each we are given a comprehensive book showing where the parks are that offer half price sites (along with any restrictions for using these discounts, such as particular days of the week or times of the year or number of days the discount is good for.) We’ve used these discounts throughout this trip and have saved ourselves much more than both annual dues have cost us. Over 99.9% of the time, the RV parks offering these discounts are very nice. Choosing the less than.1% that ended up being below our standards was usually because we didn’t do a good job of researching how other RVers rate the parks. We do that research online through a web site at www.rvparkreviews.com where RV travelers from all over the country post their opinions and criticism of parks they have stayed at. (This too is very helpful for any of you planning on taking up the RV life-style.)

If you are interested in finding out more about these options, check out www.campclubusa.com and www.passportamerica.com

The other option – the free nights at a Wal-Mart – is also a good deal for a one night stop when the distance between campgrounds is more than you would like to do in a day’s travel. With this option, there are no hookups so you are only stopping to dry camp and sleep. But it is completely safe and many RVers do it. The Wal-Marts are usually close to the freeway off ramps and most of the super stores are open 24 hours, with lots of lighting and parking lot security. Some of the Wal-Marts across the country do not allow overnight parking (usually because of local ordinances prohibiting it), but an online list of these stores is available when you are planning your travels. Wal-Mart itself also offers a book listing all the stores across the US, their locations and what departments each store has. We have stopped at Wal-Mart twice now, and will probably take advantage of this “freebie” again. At our first Wal-Mart stop at the first of this month, we took advantage of doing some grocery shopping, we picked up a cooked chicken for dinner since we couldn’t cook in the rig, and I got my hair cut at a salon inside the store.

Anyway, as I promised last time, we’d like to share more of our travels with you - so I apologize if I digressed too much from my update. Let me get back on track and tell you about “the Great Adventure” as we left the Thousand Islands region of New York and continued on to Vermont and New Hampshire.

VERMONT-

Driving to Vermont from the Thousand Islands area was along a highway going northeast along the St. Lawrence River for several miles then southeast just “spitting” distance from the Canadian border. We entered Vermont over the bridge at Rouses Point, New York 

We continued south along the Lake Champlain Byway. This byway runs along the northern length of Lake Champlain (the sixth largest lake in the U.S.) across three of the seven islands on the lake. Our next RV park was located at the south tip of Grand Isle in South Hero, Vermont and gave spectacular lake views from each site. 

Our location was just a few miles across the connecting Hwy 2 to the mainland of Vermont. It offered us the opportunity to visit the state capitol of Montpelier   

The capitol building dome is covered in real gold leaf. It is one of the nation’s oldest and best preserved state capitols still in use.

While driving around Vermont, we found the landscape to be one of the greenest and very pastoral.

Beautiful old farm houses dotted the scenery.

The numerous organic farms and dairies are a mainstay of Vermont’s agricultural economy.

We took advantage of the local produce stands to feast on a bounty of fresh tomatoes, corn and other locally grown fruits and vegetables.

Beautiful old churches were in every town. Some were built of local stone, others the variety we all equate with New England - all white with the tall steeple. In one small village the grouping of the county court house, church, town hall and surrounding homes reminded us of a scene on a Christmas card without the snow. 

And of course, the covered bridges are one of the famous landmarks of this area of the country. Vermont has the greatest concentration of covered bridges in the United States – a total of 114 – many of which are still in use.

One hundred years ago there were over 600 covered bridges, but the flood of 1927 left only about 200.

We were able to drive through this bridge, but sadly we fear it may have been destroyed in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene that hit that area of Vermont weeks after we visited there.

The folks of Vermont, unlike the talkative outwardly friendly folks we met in the southern states, are a reserved lot and don’t talk much. But we were delighted with their local humor in some of these signs we came across.

One of our day trips was a guided tour of the Rock of Ages Granite Quarry in Barre. Granite industries and artistry has been a mainstay of Central Vermont for more than a century. Years of extraction from this quarry have created the largest and deepest monumental granite quarry in the world. It is 450 feet deep, 550 feet wide and a quarter mile long. The top spans 27 acres. The visitors’ center explains how nature created underground pockets of the famous Barre gray granite. A narrated bus tour takes you to the quarry. 

Block and carved granite facades of the local Barre granite are prevalent in the buildings (many more than 100 years old) throughout Vermont and also in many famous buildings and monuments throughout America. The Rock of Ages quarry not only mines the stone, but fashions cemetery monuments, vaults and sculptures for cemeteries throughout the world.

After the bus tour, we came back to tour the facilities where the monuments, vaults and sculptures are made.

Beautiful finished products.

Jim suggested we "etch" something in this large granite piece and toss it in the truck. Of course that was impossible, since it weighed in at several tons! Oh well - "R.I.P. Jimmie"

  

Not far from the Rock of Ages is the Hope Cemetery. Each year visitors from all over the world tour Hope cemetery. This and other local cemeteries are more than a resting place for generations of stone cutters; they are outdoor museums containing the nation’s finest examples of memorial design and craftsmanship. Besides the grave stones you would expect to see in a cemetery, there were some really unique monuments here-

Sadly, this young man was too young. His family must have loved him very much.

This gentleman made sure he had the last word to those who needed to hear that "final" sermon. The other two sides of his headstone had scripture verses. His wife's headstone, next to his was carved with similar messages. Each time visitors come to their grave sites, they are still proclaiming the truth!

Perhaps the one memorial that stood out was the one to Elia Corti. He was a truly gifted young Italian who carved many of the granite monuments in the cemetery and around town. On Corti's grave site this outstanding piece of memorial art is extraordinary because it is cut from one block of granite. It is life size and we are told that it is a remarkable likeness of the man. Mr. Corti is seated in front of a shell rock pitched stone. His hand rests on a shortened column. It is complete in every detail showing the seams in his coat, the folds of his tie and the creases in his trousers, the buttons and button holes down to the last thread. The tools of his trade, calipers, chisel, square and hammer are at the foot of the shortened column. The palm leaf on the other side symbolizes Spiritual Victory. This memorial was lovingly and carefully carved by his brother William Corti and his brother-in-law John Comi.   

Our next Vermont day trip was a tour of the famous Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory in Waterbury. We learned how two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, turned a $5 ice cream making correspondence course into a global ice cream phenomenon. 

 

On site at Ben & Jerry’s is the “Flavor Graveyard.” How many of these flavors do you recall?

We also managed to include a trip to the Vermont Teddy Bear Company the same day we toured Ben & Jerry’s. This small manufacturer is one of the largest producers of teddy bears and the largest seller of teddy bears by mail order and the internet. The company handcrafts each of its teddy bears and produces almost 500,000 teddy bears each year. The company was founded in 1981 by John Sortino, who first made a jointed teddy bear for his little girl. It was so popular, he decided to sell the handcrafted bears in an open-air market in Burlington, Vermont. Sortino happened upon the idea of packaging and selling bears through the mail when a tourist visiting Burlington wanted a bear mailed to her home. The concept was called the "Bear-Gram", which features the customized teddy bear placed in a box (complete with an "air hole") and stuffed with other goodies.

Each bear is guaranteed for life (yours - not the bear's). No matter what happens to him, you can send it back to the company and they will fix him in the bear hospital and send him back to you good as new.

Aren't they cute!

Our final Vermont sight-seeing day-trip was to the Shelburne Museum near Burlington. This is one of the finest, most diverse and unconventional museums of art, design and Americana. It has over 150,000 works in 39 exhibition buildings on 45 acres.  There was so much to see at this museum, but unfortunately we only had time to see just a part of it.  It would have taken two full days to fully appreciate and see all the exhibits, but we stopped there on our last day in Vermont.

One of the exhibits was called Paperwork in 3D. It included works by 25 contemporary artists who transform flat sheets of paper into three-dimensional art. The following pictures were by two different artists. These life-sized jungle animals looked so real-It's hard to believe they are crafted from paper:

This artist fashioned life-like life-sized people. The artist installed a device inside the chest of each figure to simulate a realistic heart beat. If you put your hand on the figure's shoulder, you could feel the heart beat.

This round barn built in 1901 houses many exhibits.

One exhibit was the rare 1902 Dentzel carousel exhibition -  The carousel was manufactured in Philadelphia by the Gustav Dentzel Carousel Company. Because individual carousel figures are prized as folk art, many carousels have been broken up and the figures sold off individually. To have all 40 animals as they were originally painted is rare. This collection of these beautifully carved wooden carousel animals may be so uncommon that it could be one-of-a-kind.

The museum even has a 220 foot 1906 steamboat, the Ticonderoga, that sailed Lake Champlain, carrying passengers and cargo up and down the lake at the turn of the century.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

After a nine day stay in Vermont, we traveled on east and made a short 3 day visit to the White Mountain region of New Hampshire. We only had two full days to drive around the area.

Like Vermont, the small towns of New Hampshire are picture postcard scenes of white-steepled churches and brick, granite and marble buildings. 

The town of Littleton, New Hampshire was especially captivating. 

Outside the public library they have a statue of Pollyanna – one of my favorite 1960’s Disney movies, adapted from the best-selling 1913 novel by Eleanor H. Porter that is now considered a classic of children’s literature. Every summer Littleton hosts a festival known as "The Official Pollyanna Glad Day". Of course, we were not in town at festival time.

We took a circle drive from our RV campground in Bethlehem on the scenic White Mountain Trail through the Crawford Notch to the town of Conway, then back to Bethlehem via the Kancamagus Scenic Byway. We stopped at the famous Mount Washington Hotel and walked around the hotel’s veranda, taking in the view of the White Mountains and trying to picture how beautiful it must be autumn in the splendor of the fall colors.

Mt. Washington Hotel

View from the veranda at the Mt. Washington

the lobby

 

We checked the hotel off our list as someplace we would NEVER be able to afford to stay – but it’s nice to dream!

 

There’s much to do in this area as well as the rest of New Hampshire – but we were pressed for time and only touched on what there is to do and see. This may be a “come again” trip in the future – perhaps some Fall, especially since there are two New Hampshire MMAP project locations close by. 

I’m sure I have overwhelmed your senses again with all the pictures and babbling on. So, let me close this update. From New Hampshire we went to Maine for 14 days. (I wrote all about that part of our trip in an earlier blog entry – I think it was four updates prior to this one.) In a few days I will try to cover the next leg of our journey after Maine with our travels to Boston, Plymouth and Gettysburg.

One thing this trip has shown us – there is so much to see and so little time to see it all. But as we have said many times while on this Great Adventure, we have been so blessed to have experienced all that we have seen and done. Or as Pollyanna summed it up, “I’ve had such a beautiful time, so far….I knew I should before I came.”