Category Archives: Travels

Travels

Maine’s Blue Ribbon Classic:

We had several people tell us not to miss the Fryeburg Fair. Well here we are and it is called the Blue Ribbon Classic. If you are a “Big” horse fan this is where it’s at. We have been watching big Precherons and Belgins and a scattering of a few other draft horse breeds struttin’ their stuff and pulling for all their worth. They have show horses working as singles pulling carts up to four horses abreast, six horse hitches and eight horse hitches. (Think “Mac truck” with a team like that.) And many of the wagons are spit and polish till they knock your eyes out.

The real athletes, however, are the pulling teams. These are not all that different from the tractor pulls we watched earlier in Nova Scotia. Just like the tractors the dirt clods fly and they drag a sled down the arena. There the similarity ends. This is brute horsepower, and skilled teamsters getting all of the horses to pull in harmony. Invariably the best teams are the calmest teams and the drivers have the gentlest hands.

They have oxen pulling here also. We like to watch movies of the old west with the Conestoga wagons crossing the prairies. We have heard more than once, that horses didn’t have the stamina for the arduous trip. The best teams were oxen teams. They were more reliable, and able to get along on much poorer feed than horses. Some of the teams we have seen are huge and beautiful matched pairs. I find it interesting that you lead a team of oxen from the front, but you drive a team of horses from the rear.

If you are curious to see what Judy has been looking at for our next RV, take a look below. This one would take about a four horse hitch to get it down the road, Gypsy style.

We met up with fellow Alpine owners, Mary and George, here at the Fryeburg fair. We first met them last January in Quartzite Arizona. We have kept in touch by e-mail this summer and were able to meet here at the fairgrounds. Mary was entered in the Skillet Toss, so we had someone to root for in the big event. Guys you need to stay about 40 feet clear. These gals can pitch a skillet forty feet, and some of them can keep it right on the line. There were a couple of wild one’s however. With them you were safer on the line.

For now we bid you goodbye from friendly Maine and the Fryeburg fair.

With Love, Gary and Judy

Gypsy Wagon at Fryeburg Fair
Judy Contemplating a New RV at the Fryeburg Fair
Travels

Androscoggin River:

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.

Androscoggin River, Maine
Canoeing on the Androscoggin River near Bethel Maine, Gary Dinsmore
Travels

The Murphy Factor:

Well we are still seeing lots of neat new places and doing fun things, but we have a hitch-hiker along. His name is Murphy. Now I won’t go into detail for I don’t want to sound like a whiner but here are some of the things that Murphy has had his fingers in…

We have spent the last couple days visiting Ricky Lord’s Computer Repair Service in Calais Maine. Our Laptop Computer caught a virus and wasn’t feeling very well. You could punch his go button and he would make a brave attempt to get up, sniffle a couple times and go back to bed. Ricky finally identified the critter, a Trojan called Dropper.32.delf. It had been lying dormant since October of 2004 and woke up on September 16, 2005. This virus took over ownership of our computer, assigned its own password and wouldn’t let anyone start up or change the computer. Thanks for the help Ricky.

This took several trips in the motor home to Calais Maine where Ricky has his shop; a fellow camper came up and pointed out that the cover door over our hot water heater was missing after one of these trips. He took a ride on his Harley later in the afternoon and retraced our route to Calais and he did find our cover door…it had been run over…repeatedly. A couple hours with a ball peen hammer and a bumping steel and the door fits again. It ain’t pretty but it is functional.

But wait, that is not enough. When I went to start up my newly remodeled computer I was missing my power supply. A call to Ricky confirmed my fears. It was 30 miles back up the road in Calais Maine. We are starting to feel like commuters.

What next; how about the bedroom curtain jumping its track. Now we are experts at removing the window treatments and putting them back together.

Through all of that we have continued our travels. We exited Canada on Monday, September 18th. We crossed over from St. Stephen, New Brunswick to Calais Maine. Along the way we ate our way through the Ganong Chocolate Museum, filled up with cheap(er) Diesel in the USA and restocked our totally depleted supply of vegetables and fruits. We have been riding Path, our faithful Tandem Bicycle, daily and are starting to get back in shape after doing without the bicycle for so long. We rode out to West Quoddy Head Light House today. This cape is the most easterly point in the United States, and it has a very pretty red and white striped light house on it. Tomorrow we plan to do about a 20 mile ride on Campobello Island which is back in New Brunswick. To get there from Canada they have to take a series of ferries. Here in Lubek Maine there is a short International bridge to the island. It is famous for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s summer home. They tell us we can walk out to the light house on the far end if this island also, but the tide needs to be out to do it. These are still Bay of Fundy tides so there should be lots of semi-dry ocean floor to walk on.

Well it is time to say good bye and send along our love to all.

Gary and Judy

West Quoddy Head Lighthouse.
West Quoddy Head Lighthouse, Easternmost Point in the USA