Today was another travel day.  Charlie and the kids cleaned up the campsite and played games while Ryon and I made our requisite run to Dunkin Donuts for wifi access.  Ryon is finishing the second draft of his paper, so he will hopefully turn it in by the end of the weekend.  Then we will be done with having to worry about class deadlines!  However, all these runs to Dunkin Donuts are helping me to stay on top of publishing the blog.  Just in case you are wondering, we discovered that Dunkin Donuts was started just outside Boston, so there is at least one Dunkin Donuts in every small town.  I prefer going there over McDonald’s many times.  They definitely make a better iced coffee than McDonalds.

When we returned, Charlie had everything completely ready to go, so I backed right up to the camper, Charlie hooked us up, and off we went.  We didn’t have a long day of riding in front of us, so we took our time.  As our fridge doesn’t hold a lot of food, we stopped again at Sams Club to pick up more bread, veggies, canned goods, etc.  We thought we had a tail light out, so Charlie walked down to WalMart to buy more bulbs while I took the kids into Sams.  As it turned out, it wasn’t the bulb; evidently we blew a fuse, but we decided to pick that up later.

We drove along seeing beautiful views of Maine’s coastline.  The kids saw a large bridge that they wanted to drive over, so we were fortunate that our route was taking us that way.

On the bridge going over Penobscot Narrows

As we got closer to our destination, we thought the silly kayak racks were coming loose, so we stopped to check them.  Nope they were fine, but there was a funny smell of burning wood.  We couldn’t find anything wrong, so after yet another bathroom stop, off we went again.  A little later, I was sure that I heard a noise that sounded like something was loose or dragging.  We found a place to pull over, and sure enough, Charlie found that we had a broken leaf spring on the camper.  We hobbled along to a mechanic who referred us to another mechanic, who made a phone call to another mechanic to make sure the 3^rd one could fix it for us.  Sure enough, the 3^rd gentleman could fix it, but he would need to go to the nearest city to pick up the part and wouldn’t be able to fix it until tomorrow.  Fortunately, his shop was also at his house, so he was happy to let us sleep in our camper for the night.  As it turned out, his shop was on the same road we needed to be on to go to our campground, and we were only 8 minutes away.  Oh well, we’ll make it there tomorrow.

We left our camper at the shop to go find some dinner.  We managed to find a great restaurant for BBQ and had some really tender shredded pork, ribs, bbq chicken, and Italian sausage along with potato salad, coleslaw, and baked beans.

Nicholas and Amelia waiting for dinner. This is as close to a smile as I can get Nicholas to give me when a camera is pointed at him 🙂

Isaac and Nathanael enjoying their dinner.

It was delicious.  It was a place where you eat outside at various tables (we ended up taking up 4 tables), and they had a playground where the little ones were able to play after we ate.

It was a blessing that we were able to hobble to his shop and not have to have a tow, and most importantly, we made it there safely.  We were also very grateful that we were able to sleep in the camper for the night.  It was a nice cool evening, so opening the windows really cooled the camper down well for us; however, as it turned out, one of the screens opened when we opened the windows and boy did we get a ton of mosquitoes in the camper.  Charlie and I spent an hour or so playing a card game and killing mosquitoes all over the place. Thankfully, it was cool enough in the camper that we wanted to be under the blankets which helped protect us from the mosquitoes, and we still managed to kill enough to get a good night’s sleep!

Blessings,

Rebecca