To the Desert, to the Ocean and Back.

Up until about two o'clock last Thursday afternoon, I was living the delusion that it was actually Wednesday and I had a full day plus an evening to get ready to go camping on Friday morning. I'm sure you can imagine the chaos that ensued upon my realization that I had, in fact, only about four hours of daylight left to get things ready. Ack! If you assumed that we got leaving rather late on Friday morning, well, you would have assumed correctly. It was a quick weekend but a fun one.

We stayed two nights at the KOA in Freeport/Durham and went 'cheater' camping. I say 'cheater' because we didn't actually stay in a tent (we haven't got one big enough for both of us and our stuff, nevermind adding a baby and all of HER stuff!); we stayed in a 'Kamping Kabin' which came complete with a heater, a mini fridge (that proved quite handy) and a microwave. We didn't actually use the microwave but it was nice to know that if the weather had turned sour (as it is wont to do on the Maine coast) we could've nuked our hotdogs instead of roasting them.

On Saturday, our first stop was the Desert of Maine. Oi. The people were really nice - no complaints there, but the tour seemed....silly. They have the actual 'desert' area fenced in so of course you can't see it which is good because if you saw it, you would've seen almost all of it and there would be no reason to pay. Mr. J. still has all the pictures on his camera to be downloaded later today so when they're in the computer they'll be up on the blog. Anyway, the desert is billed as 'Maine's I-can't-remember-the-adjective natural phenomenon!' The problem is, according to the explanation we were given, the whole pile 'o' sand came about as the result of poor farming practices. So...natural phenomenon my foot!

The rest of our day was spent doing a little shopping. Our lucky Little Goat (or should we just call her Miss Moneybags?) got some new bits and pieces of summer wardrobe and a brand new Radio Flyer Walker Wagon. The latter we picked up for a steal at the LL Bean outlet where I also - moment of silence, please - lost my sunglasses. I'm almost sure it was some manifestation of one of Murphy's Laws since just two weekends ago, Erin K and I were having a discussion about sunglasses, wherein I explained that I inherited my sunglasses from Mr. J. right before our trip to Hawaii several years ago. I had been searching around for a pair and Mr. J. kept finding ones he liked so we finally bought him news one and I took over the old pair. In the interim, I found a pair of sweet shades at Costco that were on sale. So they've been my backup pair, until Saturday when it became apparent that after checking back three times with various LL Bean employees my best sunglasses ever have gone AWOL and of course, now I can't find my backup pair either.

But I digress. The camping weekend was fun; we headed home on Sunday morning after stopping to pick up the best cinnamon buns we've ever eaten (May is turning out to be a good month for trying 'new' food!) and playing at the beach just a little. We also stopped to eat, for Mother's Day dinner out, at Texas Roadhouse where there are giant barrels of peanuts to munch while you're waiting to get seated and you are allowed, nay, expected, to throw your peanut shells on the floor. It was tasty and fun but I couldn't stop thinking about the mess and how much I wanted to come back with my vacuum!

Anyway, here are more pictures from our Quebec City trip. I need to get the camping pictures ready to go. Maybe tomorrow.

Fog.

Old (original?) city gate.

My next bike.

The city at night. All the people that would normally
be there were probably at the club next door to our hostel.
It was SOOOOO loud on Fri/Sat nights. I still can't figure out
how nobody else heard it on Friday night. I'm not crazy! I'm not!!

Old armory.

Don't mess with my baby, yo.

The end, or 'fin' as they say en Francais.