Windjammer Days marks the kick off to summer in the Boothbay region and is a time to reconnect with family, friends and neighbors after the long winter, an opportunity to support local businesses and welcome visitors. It is a time to honor our maritime history and celebrate the vital role it plays in the lives of all who live here.

We spent this great, sunny day on Cabbage Island, with a lobster and clambake on a three hour tour.  Other than a brief squall, we enjoyed a great day.  And we made it back in one day.

Once we got back onto dry land, we were stuck in place by the Windjammer Parade held at the harbor.

We really love Maine!

This area of Maine is quickly casting a spell on us.  Between the beauty of the Campground and all the beauty around us, we may never leave...until it gets cold.  Seriously, we drove around BoothBay Harbor for a while this morning and this afternoon I drove to Walmart in Brunswick - a 45 minute drive that I loved.  On the way there, the tide was in.  On the way back, the tide was out.  

It seems that everything looks different every time we see it.   The sun has been peaking in and out all day so some pictures are a bit hazy cause of the fog while others are brightly lit.

​The tugboat?  Our lunch :)

Yesterday, we spent three hours cleaning the outside of the rig and we finally got the mud off.  

The kids supervised (?)

Our campground luck has not been holding out too well.  We left CT early because of a bad campground.  We were looking forward to getting up here in Maine to Lake Pemaquid.  Our luck didn't hold out.

The campground looked dated and worn, but I went into the office with high hopes.  Those hopes started going downhill when I mentioned, several times, that we were a 43 ft rig and needed space to turn and from what I could see, their roads were not terribly wide.  After assuring me that it would be fine and disagreeing on what route to bring us in, a worker got into the truck with me to be our guide.  IN between her bites of ice cream, she led us down a very narrow turn that I didn't think Dave could make.  He made it the first time.  We had toi turn around and go back out because the office was deep inside the campground and our site was before one reached the office.  A sign would have been nice.

Making the same turn again to the left, Dave didn't have enough room.  He hit the door that houses our power cord reel, doing a lot of damage that we'll have to pay for.  She finally showed us where our site was and took off to eat her ice cream.  When I looked at the site number, it didn't match up to our paperwork.  But I backed us in and Dave started hooking up.  Sure enough, she comes back in her car and starts yelling at me that we're in the wrong site and will have to move.  I tried to explain to her that the site she wanted us to go to would not fit us and she kept arguing.  Dave finally blew his top and said we were leaving this hellhole.

I went back to the office and actually got all our money back.  We agreed to spend the night because it was getting late and we needed to find a new campground.  We found one, 25 minutes from here.  We drove out and looked at it and the campground is wonderful and our site is even better.

So, lesson #1 learned:  No more staying at campgrounds with dirt roads and dirt sites.  Gravel or paved only.  Our rig is so filthy from the CT mud that it won't wash off with a hose.  We'll have to get on a ladder and use a scrub brush.  It has never looked this filthy in all the time we've owned a rig.  And the inside is just as bad.  I laid down two bath mats to try and capture the mud, but it's going to take some scrubbing of floors to get it clean.

At least in our new campsite, we have a wooden deck and lots of grass, along with a pond and the requisite ducks.

Lesson #2:  If it looks like we can't make it through the roads, we don't go.  Period.  We get our money back and go elsewhere.

Lesson #3:  More research.  More research.  Google Earth.

After spending three days in the worst campground we've ever stayed in, we plan on leaving early tomorrow.  I'll post more about the Campground later in reviews.

Sunday, Father's Day was the only day we got out for a while.  I hate that Dave's Father's Day was not as great as my Mother's Day was, but that's what happens on the road.

To quote the website: "Mystic Seaport is the nation’s leading maritime museum. Founded in 1929 to gather and preserve the rapidly disappearing artifacts of America’s seafaring past, the Museum has grown to become a national center for research and education with the mission to “inspire an enduring connection to the American maritime experience.”
The Museum’s grounds cover 19 acres on the Mystic River in Mystic, CT and include a recreated New England coastal village, a working shipyard, formal exhibit halls, and state-of-the-art artifact storage facilities. The Museum is home to more than 500 historic watercraft, including four National Historic Landmark vessels, most notably the 1841 whaleship Charles W. Morgan, America’s oldest commercial ship still in existence.
The Museum hosts 284,000 visitors annually and has an active membership base of 14,000 from all over the Unites States and the world.
A stroll through the historic village enables visitors to experience firsthand from staff historians, storytellers, musicians, and craftspeople just what life was like to earn one’s living from the sea. In the Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard, they can watch shipwrights keeping the skills and techniques of traditional shipbuilding alive as they restore and maintain the Museum’s watercraft collection and other vessels.
The Museum’s 41,000 square-foot Collections Research Center (CRC) offers exceptional physical and electronic access to the more than 2 million artifacts. The collections range from marine paintings, scrimshaw, models, tools, ships plans, an oral history archive, extensive film and video recordings, and more than 1 million photographs—including the incomparable Rosenfeld Collection. The CRC is also home to the G.W. Blunt White Library, a 75,000-volume research library where scholars from around the world come to study America’s maritime history.
To share the experience this physical record represents, Mystic Seaport employs a diverse staff of scholars, librarians, historic interpreters, educators, scientists, musicians, and skilled artisans. The Museum’s educational philosophy has three parts: onsite, on board, and online. Students at all levels are invited to come to the Museum to participate in a unique learning experience, whether as part of an elementary school field trip, a college semester with the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program (a partnership with Williams College), or a graduate seminar with the Munson Institute. Sail training is offered through Community Sailing Programs or on a voyage aboard the 1931 schooner Brilliant. The Museum has also developed an innovative Mystic Seaport for Educators website, where students and educators can utilize digital access to the collections to help shape new learning tools and bring the American maritime experience into their classrooms.
For more than 85 years, visitors, students, and scholars have turned to Mystic Seaport to preserve and interpret America’s maritime experience. The Museum’s commitment to that mission is as strong as ever.
Public HistoryAt Mystic Seaport, we strive to create an environment where visitors not only learn from us, but we learn from them. The concept is called Public History and it allows our visitors to experience history in ways they haven’t before."

We felt like we were strolling through an old sea village!

Our favorite day in Pennsylvania had to be in Strasburg, PA.  Known as one of the ten most scenic Railroads in the country, Strasburg is one long train adventure.  The Strasburg Rail Road is the oldest continuously operating railroad in the western hemisphere and the oldest public utility in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Our day began with a 4 1/2 mile rail journey through Pennsylvania's beautiful Amish countryside.  We enjoyed sitting in the outside rail car, watching the scenery go by.Back at the station, we were fortunate enough to go on a  behind-the-scenes tour of where passenger cars and steam engines are built, restored and refurbished.  Strasburg has a machine shop that restores and refurbishes old trains from around the country.  Refurbishing one of those monsters can take decades.

After the tour was a quick lunch, followed by a great rest outside, looking at how they have managed to turn this old rail station into a small mini train town.  The weather was beautiful, as was the scenery.  The amount of people was just enough to add to the charm.

We finished the day at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.  I was amazed at the number of full sized trains they had!  

If you find yourself in Lancaster County, PA, make sure to set aside a day at the Train Depot in Strasburg.  Between the rides, tours and museums, it's well worth the trip.

We're a little behind on our travel updates, and it's time to catch up.  Our second to last trip in Pennsylvania was to Philly.  When we'd listened to the weather report the night before, they told us partly cloudy and highs in the low 70s, which sounded like a perfect time to go.

Not so, it drizzled most of the day, was gloomy and cold.  In addition, I think every school in PA had decided to spend the day.

We decided to make it easy on ourselves and book two tickets on the Jump on-off bus.  There were a couple of things we were very interested in seeing.  One was Elfreth's Alley, a street in Philadelphia which is referred to as "Our nation's oldest residential street," dating to 1702. As of 2012, there are 32 houses on the street, which were built between 1728 and 1836.  We managed to squeeze in between groups and get a real feel of how it must have been to live there in the old days.  Each house was well maintained, even today and very colorful.

Dave's favorite part of the day was the Reading Terminal Market.  The old Railroad Terminal has been turned into an indoor farmer's Market/food court.

The Reading Terminal Market, established in 1892 at 12th and Arch Streets, is the nation’s oldest continuously operating farmers’ market. Through its long and interesting history , it has seen times both good and bad, but has emerged in the 21st century as one of the greatest public markets in the country.

When you visit the market, you can enjoy eating virtually every type of cuisine, from sublime soul food and exquisite Asian and Middle Eastern dishes to authentic Philly Cheesesteaks and traditional Pennsylvania Dutch fare — all available from largely family-run stands.

We ate a German lunch and it wasn't the best.  But the farmer's market stands were outstanding and so full of variety.

After leaving the market, we decided to spend the rest of the short afternoon on the tourist bus and hit a couple of highlights.  But, once we got on the bus, it started raining and didn't look like it was going to stop anytime soon.  We spent some time riding around town before heading home.

We thought it was probably past time to update our pictures of the inside of the rig, showing the changes we've made.  Let us know what you think!