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.