Plymouth Rock

Last Wednesday we drove to Carver, MA for a 3-night stay and to visit the Cape Cod area. We went into Plymouth and enjoyed a very good dinner at Woods Seafood fish market and restaurant at the harbor. Then we walked over to the seafront and saw the Mayflower II and Plymouth Rock. For some reason I thought Plymouth Rock would be sitting on shore but it was sitting on the sand in shallow water.

Thursday we drove over to Cape Cod and went to Hyannis. It’s a nice town and we visited the John F. Kennedy Memorial and saw Hyannis beach.

 

We went back to Woods Seafood for lunch yesterday and I enjoyed another lob-stah roll.

We drove today to Jersey City, NJ where we have a scenic view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island from Liberty Harbor RV Park. My sister Marcia and brother-in-law Mike met us here with their motorhome. We're going to spend a couple of days sight seeing in New York City.

Steve & Julie Cornelius

Boston

We drove from Kennebunkport to Littleton MA last Friday, July 22^nd for a 5-night stay at Boston Minuteman Campground. The campground is in a heavily wooded, hilly area about 30-miles west of Boston.

The campground office provided detailed directions so we decided to drive about 30-minutes to the nearest subway station and ride the “red line” subway to Boston Commons park in downtown Boston. Neither one of us had ever been to Boston before, so we decided to take a hop-on, hop-off trolley to get a feel for where all the historic sites were.

After our trolley tour, we walked a block from Boston Commons park to the Cheers tavern. It was interesting to see the actual bar “Bull & Finch” that the Cheers bar was based on. We ended up eating dinner there before heading out on the nearby subway.

 

 

Sunday morning we drove to the subway station and took the “red line” to Boston Commons again. We began walking the “Freedom Trail”, a 3-mile walking trail, which goes past all major historic sites and is marked by red colored bricks on the sidewalk. We thoroughly enjoyed seeing all the historic sites, including the cemetery where John Hancock, Paul Revere and Sam Adams are buried, the first public school, Paul Revere’s house, the North Church, Bunker Hill and the USS Constitution-Old Ironsides.

 

We stopped for dinner at the famous Union Oyster House, in business for 190-years and where Daniel Webster went every day. It also was a favorite of JFK and the booth he always used was marked with a special plaque. Julie tried the fried oysters and I had broiled sea scallops for dinner.

 

After dinner we stopped at the Omni Parker hotel gift shop to pick up two slices of their famous Boston cream pie to take home. It was good.

We checked and the Boston Red Sox were playing at home this week. We wanted to go on Sunday afternoon but the baseball game was sold out. We did get discounted tickets for Monday night’s game against Detroit.

We left around 4PM for the 7:30 game start. We took the red line into Boston again but had to transfer to the green line to get to Fenway Park. The challenge we faced were the large commuter crowds trying to get onto the same subway cars the baseball fans were trying to get onto. The trains that came into the transfer station were nearly full and people were squeezing onto already crowded cars.

 

Fenway Park is a baseball temple. We thoroughly enjoyed the excitement of being at the game and talking to the fans around us. However, we decided to leave at the start of the 7^th inning and start heading back. We finally found the subway stop and made out way home. It’s too bad the Red Sox lost to the Detroit Tigers 4-2.

 

 

We "moved" today to Carver, MA for a 3-night stay. We plan to visit Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Plantation, and maybe take a ferry to Nantucket.

Steve & Julie Cornelius

Freeport & Kennebunkport

We arrived in Freeport on Sunday, July 17^th for a 3-night stay. We settled in at our campground and enjoyed the evening sitting outside under our awning. The clouds in the sky were beautiful.

 

We headed in to Freeport on Monday and enjoyed lunch at Linda Bean's Maine Kitchen & Topside Tavern. Linda is the granddaughter of Leon Leonwood (L.L.) Bean. I tried the lob-stah roll and Julie had a nice salad topped with lob-stah.

The L.L. Bean flagship store is located across the street from Linda’s Maine Kitchen & Topside Tavern. We thoroughly enjoyed looking in the many departments throughout the store. The bull moose with locked antlers are only one of two moose locked antler displays in the U.S. We did buy a couple of items. Julie got a pair of flip flops. I found a nice lightweight rain jacket at the L.L. Bean outlet store for $30 off.

 

Across the walk plaza was a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop, but we were too full from lunch to try some.

 

On Tuesday afternoon we went to the wharf in South Freeport to have dinner at the family run Harraseeket Lunch & Lobster Company. We both got fresh lob-stah, but ordered smaller lob-stahs, about 1 1/4-pound, than the ones we ate in Bar Harbor. Also, these were soft-shell lob-stahs. The meat was very good, but not as firm as the hard-shell lob-stahs.

 

Yesterday, we waited until about 11AM to leave the KOA campground because we only had 49-mile drive to Kennebunkport and check-in wasn’t until 1PM at the Red Apple campground.

We went into Kennebunkport today to do some sight-seeing. Our first stop was to go see President George H. W. Bush's family compound. There was a nice tribute to him with an anchor across the water from the home. We enjoyed looking through the gift shops and then had dinner at a local restaurant. Their lob-stah roll was one of the best I've had. 

 

We head out in the morning on a short 91-mile trip to Littleton, MA where we'll stay at the Boston Minuteman Campground for 5-nights.

Steve & Julie Cornelius

Bar Harbor & Acadia National Park

On Tues, July 12^th, we left Winchester, VA and headed towards Florida, New York where we overnighted at Black Bear Campground.  Wed, we took off and drove to the Hanscom AFB Family Campground, in Bedford, MA, near Boston.

Many of the Interstate highways in the East are toll roads. The good news is they all use the E-Z Pass transponder. I purchased an E-Z Pass transponder while we were in Virginia and it was well worth it as we could drive through the toll booths without stopping.  

On Thurs, we arrived at Mt. Desert Narrows Campground near Bar Harbor, Maine for a 3-night stay. We enjoyed our first lob-stah dinner Thurs night at a nearby “lob-stah pound”. You pick out a lob-stah and they cook it for you. We had to go on-line and look at a video while we were waiting for our lob-stah to cook to see how to take it apart to eat it. There was a process.

 

 

Friday we went into Bar Harbor and had lunch. It’s a small coastal town of around 5,000 residents, but the population is much greater in the summer. It has great views of off shore islands and the Atlantic and has many restaurants and gift shops.

 

After lunch we visited Acadia National Park, high on our bucket list. Acadia is celebrating its centennial year this year as it was established as a national park in 1916 by President Teddy Roosevelt. Acadia is the only national park on the East coast and contains the highest point on the East coast, Cadillac Mountain. Although busy, it definitely didn’t have the crowds like Yellowstone. We were surprised to see so many people at Sand Beach in the park, especially since the water temperature was only 54-degrees. We thoroughly enjoyed our visit to Acadia.           

Today we went back to visit Bar Harbor and to buy my Acadia Centennial tee-shirt. Then we drove west about 40-miles to Bangor for lunch and a visit to Stephan King’s mansion home. His mansion, in the old historic district of Bangor, was architecturally interesting. We especially liked his black wrought-iron fence decorated with spiders, bat-winged creatures, and a three-headed reptile.

 

Tomorrow we head to Freeport, Maine for a 3-night stay.

Steve & Julie Cornelius

BBQ, Music & Bourbon

We left San Antonio on Thursday, June 30^th, and after an overnight stay in College Station, made our way to a RV park in Longview, Texas. We’ve stayed there before and it is close to our favorite Texas BBQ place, Country Tavern, just outside of Kilgore. It has been in business since 1939, and serves the absolute best ribs in Texas. They use pork loin back ribs. They are slow smoked, tender (tooth tender…not fall off the bone) and have the perfect smoky, bark flavor. We enjoyed dinner there on early Friday night.

  

On Saturday we overnighted outside of Little Rock, and then on Sunday drove to one of our favorite campgrounds, Tom Sawyer’s RV Park in West Memphis, Arkansas. It is right on the Mississippi River and we enjoy watching the river barges go by.

Monday morning July 4^th we drove to Nashville and we just got settled into our campsite when it started pouring down rain. We skipped going downtown to see Sheryl Crow in a free concert, followed by a spectacular fireworks show, because severe thunder storms were forecast with an expected crowd of 250,000. We stayed home and watched the concert and fireworks on TV.

 

We decided to go downtown on Tuesday night for dinner and visit a few honky tonk places. We rode a shuttle bus from the campground for $10 roundtrip per person. It was nice not to have to worry about traffic or parking. We decided on Jack’s BBQ on Broadway and it was very good. After dinner we went to Tootsies and then to Legend’s Corner, both famous Nashville honky tonk bars. There is no cover charge and the music was pretty good.

 

Wednesday morning we drove to Frankfort, Kentucky for a 2-night stay at the Elkhorn Campground. On Thursday we stopped by White Castle for lunch (small hamburger sliders). After lunch we toured the Buffalo Trace distillery, a National Historic Landmark in Frankfort.  The Buffalo Trace distillery is the oldest distillery in the country. Many of the buildings were built in the late-1800s. We toured a bonded warehouse where bourbon was aging in oak barrels and then toured another building where they were hand bottling special aged bourbon. Afterwards, the tour guide then took our group to the visitor’s center to taste some of their products.

We stopped overnight in West Virginia on Friday where a thunderstorm knocked out the campground electrical power and we also lost water (electric well pumps). Oh well, we had to use our own generator and on-board water supply to get by. We drove to Winchester, Virginia on Saturday and stayed for 3-days to visit our niece Stephanie, brother-in-law Mike and my sister Marcia.

Today, July 12^th, we left Winchester and drove through 5 states (Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York). We’re overnighting at Black Bear Campground near the village of Florida, NY. Tomorrow we head to Bedford, MA (near Boston) and on Thursday to Bar Harbor, Maine to finish the last portion of our planned trip to New England.

Steve & Julie Cornelius