Thursday, September 13, 2012 – Travel Day to Bradbury Mountain, ME

Set the alarm for an early start, packed up and headed out by 8:30. I couldn’t find an RV dump on any of the maps, but when I called the ranger station yesterday, they told me it was behind the ranger station, so that was our first stop. There was absolutely no signage to the RV dump, but evidently the woman I had spoke to yesterday saw us coming and directed us to the dump, which she had to open a gate for us to get to! Of course, first I had to turn around again, as I had passed the unmarked entrance. What a poorly-managed place! I don’t know what they’re so afraid of here, there’s just this attitude that they’re afraid everyone’s going to take advantage of them and they have to prevent it at all costs, regardless of how much energy it takes! What is it about certain places, they just assume everyone is out to rip them off! All this nonsense with car tags (which no one every checked, by the way), and a locked gate to the RV dump, what’s that all about? Anyway, we finally got under way, stopped at a Burger King for breakfast, then headed up the highway (avoiding Boston entirely), first to a place where I had arranged to pick up hay (very nice hay, though the bales were kind of light for $6 each, but it was beautiful 2nd cutting hay that they were just bringing in from the field), then on to Bradbury Mountain State Park in Maine, with one stop at Shaws for grocery while Hubby stopped for gas. The park was just a few miles off the highway and very easy to find, though we made a wrong turn into the main park area instead of the campground a little further up the road. We were immediately met by a young woman ranger who had a package for me (I had arranged for a delivery and she was kind enough to bring it with her to meet us), and she made an excellent recommendation of a site suitable for us. Actually, it was two sites next to each other, but they let us have both while only charging us for one. Horses are not generally allowed here, but since it was off-season and they had the room, they were very accommodating. Not long afterward, the park manager stopped by to make sure everything was okay, again being very accommodating and friendly. It didn’t take long to get settled in, and after awhile, the woman ranger returned to collect payment. When I asked her if I needed to display my receipt in the dash of one of the vehicles, she said, “No, that’s okay, we know you’re here.” What a change from Massachusetts! Everyone was super-friendly, and it was like night and day from our last experience! Neighboring campers all greeted us nicely, several came up to visit with the horses, it was really wonderful. In fact, the only drawback was that even though quiet hours were after 10 pm, generator hours ended at 7, which made it a little hard because our batteries have been a bit weak, which means our usual evening of TV was shortened considerably, and we were so surrounded by trees we couldn’t get a satellite signal so all we had were recorded programs to watch. No matter, when the TV switched off, we just went to bed and read our Kindles for awhile. Still need to fight this bug and regain my hearing, so I’m not opposed to getting more sleep!

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