A blank page.

I love a blank page. It’s future is unwritten, open and beautiful. It is full of anticipation and maybe a little uncertainty. You get to decide what is on this page, how it looks and feels.

And so the last 8 weeks of our journey to Maine have been similar. After a flurry of reservations made and cancelled for one reason or another, we’ve been largely operating on the “don’t reserve anything” principle. This takes a certain level of being “OK” with the stress of not knowing if you’ll have a place to sleep that night, but so far we haven’t had any problems.

Lake Placid, New York

Starting in Lake Placid, NY, we literally called ahead to a campground on the way there, and reserved two sites so that the hordes of Lacrosse and Rugby players in town for tournaments wouldn’t take the last few sites. It worked. And we spent a week in one of my favorites towns so far this trip.

Cascade Peak in Lake Placid

We climbed Cascade Mountain, Chris ran up the tallest summit in the Adirondacks, Mount Marcy. We swam at Mirror Lake and I swam the 1.2 mile Ironman course they have set up all the time. We absolutely adored our time in Lake Placid and would do it all over again.

Stowe and East Burke, VT

From there we randomly headed south for a family rafting trip, and then a few days later decided we all had the mountain biking bug and turned for the Green Mountains of Vermont. We found an awesome campground in Stowe called Gold Brook Campground (highly suggest it) and found even better mountain biking trails. We took our small horde (we are currently traveling with our friends from Currently Wandering and yes, we are a horde) to the trails and had a blast.

From there we parted ways with our friends and decided to make our way to the Kingdom Trails near Burke Mountain, VT for more riding. With lack of cell phone coverage information and an even greater lack of camping for RVs near East Burke, we totally pulled into the first thing that had any availability and a pool. Cause, my gosh, it was sweltering.

The Kingdom trails are an awesome network of trails put in near East Burke, VT. The major difficulty for us was the need for cell coverage (work) and the fact that local campgrounds were tent only.  Add to this a day-use fee for the trails that totaled $52 for our whole family, and we decided we couldn’t stay long in the area… So we sugared and hyped up the three kids for an epic day of riding, paid our money, biked some awesome trails and when the heat and humidity was no longer bearable, we called it a day and jumped in the river.

White Mountains of New Hampshire

We hitched up and busted out of the area into the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We were totally stoked to be back in big mountains and had hopes of staying for 1-2 weeks. We could even find camping in the area for as long as we wanted but (always the but…) cell phone coverage is abysmal everywhere in the Whites! Add to that really unfriendly people and we decided to “epic” the Whites as well.

So similar to Burke, we picked the 1 day with good weather, hyped up the kids and took off hiking. Chris wanted to do all the peaks in the area, so why not do them on one day? I dropped him off at one end of the Presidential Range at dawn, went back to get the kids, drove UP Mount Washington, and hiked down to Lake of the Clouds.

We even timed it perfectly to cross paths with Chris half way through his 20 mile traverse. It was awesome being in the high alpine again.

From there our blank page continued.

Filling In Our Blank Page

We arrived in Maine ahead of schedule. Our only reservations are for Acadia National Park, made 6 months ago to the day because you need reservations for the national parks 98% of the time. But we were 3 weeks early. We’d spent so much time focusing on getting TO Maine, we never thought about what we’d do it we had extra time!

And this is where our blank page has begun to fill in. We danced our way down the Bay of Fundy, over to the Northumberland Coast of Nova Scotia, met up with our friends again and decided we might as well drive as far as we can without hopping a ferry.

To Cape Breton Island we went.

Many of you might be totally lost by now. For those of you who don’t know where Cape Breton Island is, well, it is the furthest east end of Nova Scotia. Basically we are as far east as we can get without hopping a ferry to Newfoundland. Trust me, I did price out the options. In looking at a map we are closer to Greenland now, than we are to home. Eek! A tad overwhelming.

But also fun, because from here on out, every mile we drive gets us closer again to home. And that is reassuring because the nights are getting cooler and the days less humid. Fall is on the way.