Have been pretty busy since arriving in Bangor Maine two days ago. It was a long drive out of Vermont, only 260+ miles, but it took nearly 7 hours because it was all two lane roads that went up and down all these mountains. A very beautiful drive however, the trees are starting to change color so there are some reds, oranges and yellows starting to show up. Not enough yet to be stunning, but enough to give some visual stimulation.

   Made it into Bangor around 5:30 and found the RV park I was looking for. It is actually on the east side of the city in a suburb called Holden, so very close to everything, but still away from most of the traffic and noise.

    Slept in a bit late yesterday morning, but needed to get up earlier than usual as I had a good friend who was up in the area working this week and she was due to get off around noon and wanted to know if I wanted to meet up with her. So I was up by 9:00 and thought I'd be ready when she called, but was still doing dishes and cleaning up when that happened. So it was around 12:30 when we finally met up. She had already eaten lunch but I hadn't, so I thought it might be fun to drive out to Bar Harbor and wander around and grab a bite to eat. So that is exactly what we did.

    A nice trip out and back. We sat and had a beer, and I had some lunch, at one of the dock restaurants there in town. Also wandered around a bit, but neither of us was particularly interested in going in to any of shops there. We spent a couple hours there before heading back to town.

    We were back into town by 5:30 so she could change for the contra dance this evening. We then found a nice pub downtown and had a quick bite to eat before the local dance started at 8:00. We both thought it might be a bit of a slow night when we first started out as there were only 20-25 people there to start with. By the time the dance was done though there had been 50-60 people at the dance, and they had all been very fun to dance with. The music for the night, from a band called 'Frigate', was outstanding and the calling, from Bill, was pretty good also. So all in all it was a very nice night.

    It was raining last night when the dance got over, but it has stopped now and I may be able to get out and do something later on this afternoon. Not sure what that will be exactly, but I'll figure something out. In the meantime I'm going to sit here for a while and listen to the 'Car Guys' and read a little bit and have some breakfast.

In the meantime, here are some photo's from 6th day on the river trip.

Day 6 on the river and the sun is starting to hit the higher parts of the canyon already.

Marty, Maggie and Paul. Part of the 'Group W' bench crew for the day.

This was kind of neat. These slots are formed over many, many years when small stones are swirled around depressions in the top of the stone. Over the years this grinds perfect holes down through the rock, some of them many feet deep. Then as the river cuts its way down through and against the stone it grinds away one side of the rock exposing these long slots in the side of the stone.

More beautiful scenery.

Our first hike of the day was up a small side canyon that ended at this wonderful pool and waterfall.

It seemed like a perfect place for one of those great photo ops. I volunteered to take pictures of anyone who wanted one so here are a bunch from that day. This is Jim and Patty.

John and Caroline

Ginny and Marty

Jill and Spud

Helen and Jim

Tom and Donna

Dennis and Jan

Paul, Maggie and Michael



Swim call.

We had a great time taking turns jumping off the ledge and into the pool. Here we have Jim showing off.

Some of the plants deep in the canyons were still blooming.

Tadpoles in one of the pools in the canyon.

Our 2nd hike of the day was up this really neat slot canyon. This is the pool at the top end of the canyon.
 

 

The lighting along the top of the canyon was wonderful.

We spent several hours here in the depths of the canyon where it was much cooler than out on the river.

 

Our campsite for the night. Once again the view for dinner is amazing.

For some reason all the chairs sitting here in the dark caught my attention and made me think they had all banded together for the night and were just resting until morning when they would have to go back to work. (I might of had to much beer to drink that night).