What an amazing weekend we just spent together with some friends of ours!! On Friday evening we traveled North to Medway, Maine, where we stayed at the Gateway Inn.
Our friends arrived a couple of hours after we did and we stayed up chatting 'til midnight. In the morning, the kids anxiously waited for the pool to open at 7:00 so that they could go swimming!
Those are puzzles on the walls of the hotel, that someone had put together. I thought that was a wonderful way to display their hard work! This one was my favorite...
Meanwhile, everyone ate their breakfast and we packed up the snowmobiles with everything we would need for a day & a night spent out on the trails...
Our friends have a
ski-boose that they pull behind one of their snowmobiles and the kids each took a turn riding in it. They loved it!! It also protected them from the worst of the cold. Everywhere we went it attracted a lot of attention, and one guy even offered to buy it on the spot! It's an ingenious invention which enables you to take young children to places that you couldn't otherwise.
We took lots of little breaks, sometimes to let faster sleds go past us, sometimes to snack and sometimes to pee...
Let me tell you now - that is one of the rare times when I wish I was a guy! Everywhere we went we saw little yellow snow snakes - guys don't have to leave the trail to go, they just stand beside their sleds. We girls on the other hand, when we have to 'go', we have to carefully choose an evergreen with ample branches that is far enough from the trail for privacy, and wallow through the deep snow to get behind it! Is that fair???? I don't think so!
At each trail junction, Dad would consult with his GPS & maps and make sure we were headed in the right direction. At one of the junctions, he jumped off his sled and started running up the trail waving his arms. He recognized some people that he works with! He knew to keep an eye out for them 'cause they were going to be hiking one of the mountains, but it's such a massive area that he didn't really think he would connect with them! They had a neat contraption put together to get all their gear up to the campground where they were staying that night, although maybe the 2 in the sled are a little bit crazy?
We drove over to the Abol Bridge Store for our lunch, which consisted of hot dogs, chips, soda & cappuccino for me. Dessert was Oreo cookies. Yummy, but not very nutritious...
After lunch we headed into Baxter State Park. The trail through the park is not groomed because they enforce a 20 mph speed limit, and the moguls created by all the snowmobiles that travel the trail help. They are painful to go over at any speed! Especially for someone like me who has only driven a snowmobile 3 times! It was extremely challenging, but I only crashed once! Okay, so it wasn't really a crash, but I did find myself sideways off the edge of the trail. Fortunately, I wasn't going fast and I wasn't another 2 inches over 'cause the HUGE rock that I brushed the snow off the side of would have crushed my and my son's legs. We were very lucky! 2 couples that were riding together happened along from the opposite direction while we were trying to figure out how to get my sled back on the trail. They immediately jumped off their sleds to help, but Dad was able to just drive it right out of the ditch. We all shared a good laugh about how that was because they were there to offer support!
The last leg of Saturday's trip was the hardest. It was getting dark, getting colder and we were exhausted from trying to control our snowmobiles over the rough terrain. We were sure happy to see the lights at the Matagamon General Store!! We hurried in, got checked into our cabin, which was cute as the dickens and wicked cozy and then had some supper. Everything is homemade and super yummy! We all had great big hamburgers/cheeseburgers on homemade rolls with potato wedges and chocolate cookies.
That night the kids were ready to rumble and had fun roughhousing all over the bunk beds in the cabin. No one got hurt, but there were some close calls by the time we told them to go to sleep! Considering it was the first time they had met, they all got along extremely well and we parents were very pleased. We adults sat around drinking beer and reminiscing. We've known the other father ever since elementary school - he was in my brother's class all through school and became good friends with my husband in high school and beyond. We've been out of touch in the last couple of years since we moved away from town, so it was good to reconnect and spend some time with him & his new family.
Sunday morning we woke up and did our best to clean up with no running water. The kids enjoyed the novelty of it, although they were grouchy about the freezing cold outhouse! The seat literally had snow & ice on it!! Brrrrr....
We rode over to the store again for an amazing breakfast - Dad ordered a breakfast pizza. I was sooooo impressed!! It was delicious!!
Our youngest spent his allowance on some little stuffed critters and our oldest bought himself a new whittling knife. As a thank you for watching our dogs, we purchased my parents a book written by a retired game warden who lives in the area, and bought my in-laws a picture frame which we filled with a photo of us taken during the trip. (Aren't digital cameras amazing? We purchased the print on the way home!)
After breakfast we rode back down the trail just into Baxter State Park to see Horse Mountain, which had been obscured by the darkness the night before.
In order to find a big enough space to get turned around, we had to continue on to Matagamon Lake, where Dad's friend couldn't resist the opportunity to zip out across the lake! He usually doesn't have the kids with him on snowmobiling trips, so going slow all weekend was a little bit tough. He thoroughly enjoyed blowing off some steam!!
Next we headed up to the Hay Lake Lookout for an absolutely stunning view of Mount Katahdin and The Travelers.
Awesome doesn't even begin to describe it....
Unfortunately, it was also freezing, so we couldn't stay there very long. The temperature was hovering in the single digits and the wind was blowing a gale. Not safe, especially for the little ones. We hurried back to the store to warm up and get gas for the snowmobiles before the long ride back to Medway.
Upon leaving Matagamon, we started driving South on ITS 85, a snowmobile super-highway! It is a great trail with plenty of scenery and lots of variation. The majority of it is wide, but occasionally it would turn into a narrow woods road. At one point we could see Mount Katahdin, just as the clouds cleared away from it -
WOW!!
Our lunch stop was at Bowlin Camps, an 1800s logging camp that overlooks the East Branch of the Penebscot River. I ate chili & a whoopie pie, Dad ate a hot dog & a whoopie pie, our oldest ate a grilled cheese sandwich & bread pudding and our youngest ate a hotdog & hot cocoa, of course. The dining cabin was filled with mounted animals gathered during their hunting expeditions. The kids really enjoyed checking those out!
After traveling for another 20 miles, we were starting to get chilled again and so were pleasantly surprised to come upon another manned camp! Camp Lunksoos sits up on a hill overlooking the river and looking out across at Katahdin, which you could just see through the snow blowing off the top. In the book,
Lost on a Mountain in Maine, the woman who rescued the lost boy saw him from the big picture window that you can see behind my son. The 10 year old boy in our group had read the book and was fascinated that this was the place that it had happened and awed by the distance that lost boy had traveled to get there from Katahdin! We enjoyed some coffee & cocoa, sandwiches & soup and headed on our way again, after chatting with the new proprietors for awhile.
Getting to Medway was the longest stretch of our ride on Sunday and boy was it COLD!! The sun set and the full moon rose, so it was unbelievably beautiful out in those snow covered woods. I thoroughly enjoyed the ride, but I also was very much aware that if anything went wrong we were miles from help, in sub-zero temperatures and high winds, with 5 children. Fortunately, we were prepared and careful and nothing went wrong. We made it back to the Gateway Inn just before dinnertime. The kids were psyched and ran for the rooms to get ready to....
swim?!? That just seemed so crazy to me. All I wanted was to stay in the hot shower for an hour or so. To each his own, I guess....
Monday morning we woke up early and started loading up the sleds and packing up the truck for the long drive home. The boys swam for about an hour too. They just love the water!!
Before we could leave Medway, the boys insisted that we go visit a veterans' memorial that they had seen from back of the snowmobiles. We adults were so focused on driving that we hadn't noticed the tank sitting up on the hill beside the trail!
We had an uneventful drive home, where we switched vehicles and headed for Standish to retrieve the dogs. Haley was overjoyed to see us arrive to rescue her! She was terrorized by my husband's parents' 3 big cats all weekend. Although she did get breaks from them when she got to go for rides in the van, which she loved! And on Saturday she got to spend the day with the Boy Scouts who came to camp down behind the house. Daisy stayed at my parents house with her 'Uncle' Duke, who was surprisingly patient with her. She was a very well behaved puppy for them and enjoyed a couple of trips out into the woods with them. It was funny - she ran right past Dad & the boys and jumped all over me! Then, she greeted everyone else in the family and tackled Haley when she got into the car with her.
