Live Free Or Die

I learned that this is the New Hampshire state motto as we put our first stop in New England in the rear view. High stakes free living here!

We left New York for Brookline, NH two hours behind schedule for a three and half hour drive. Off to a good start for our standard. We arrived in Brookline six hours later. This has been a theme for us. Apparently accurate (or even ball park) driving estimates are not our thing.

Brookline, NH is a small town, quaint, quiet, no people anywhere, in need of a parade or something. The campground we (I) chose was also small, quaint, quiet with no people anywhere. Well there were old people. Lots of old people walking their dogs, driving their mansion Class A rigs, waving a lot. I went out of my way to wave as often as possible at people. Even if I had just waved at them five minutes before on lap one of their four laps around the tiny park. “Hi, I’m still sitting in this chair same as I was five minutes ago.” my waves would say. Then the old people would respond with a wave that said, “You’re from Detroit and weird. Please stop waving at me. I’ll keep waving at you, though, because you’re weird and I don’t want you to kill me.”

The big take-away for us here is that RV parks should be stopped at for much less than a week at a time. Probably more like one night at a time. The campground was super relaxing and it got us within an hour of Boston where we went and did some touristy things. We also went to Salem and did some touristy things too. Here is a brain dump of the highlights and lowlights:

Highlights

• New England is awesomely old at everything. The town we stayed in is older than the USA.
• Was great walking around Salem and seeing the history first-hand
• Boston was great! We went to Cambridge, the Harbor, financial district, tourist district (not sure if that’s a thing)
• Boston trains are much easier to navigate than NYC
• We ate some great bagels from a bagel place I found on some blog. This got us to Cambridge, which got us to the MIT museum
• MIT museum. Everyone enjoyed this greatly. Lots of hands on stuff. Lots of technology stuff (obviously) and many photography exhibitions (surprisingly)
• Boston Harbor Cruise was really nice. Could have done it with Sandy Cheeks but we wouldn’t have had room for the narrator guy (same problem we had with New York Harbor so we took the Staten Island Ferry).
• Elliott, “when you bopped the frisbee and it split in half” - this was in reference to frisbee in the lake at our one hour long trip to Silver Lake state park (NH). The lake had some fantastic bbq smells and hilly spots for picnics, but there was some kind of neural fungal situation on this roped off area of the water (you were totally fine if you were in the water on the other side of rope. No neural problems at all)
• Erin, “when we left that RV park” - this is probably the last campground I’ll be allowed to choose on my own.
• Nolan, “Teeter totter bench” - there were lots of kids out in Cambridge doing creative things on the street. This bench was one of them. We loved the energy out there!
• Erin, “the cruise” - we saw all of the great Boston history from the harbor looking toward the wharfs.
• Milford drive-in was awesome! I was very worried about dead battery so I set a timer on my phone to remind me to start it up every 20 minutes for five hours. It was double feature of Spiderman and War for Planet of the Apes
• Bike rides
• Sandy Cheeks on the water

Lowlights

• Mini broke free from her chain and got in to a scrap with a chihuahua. This caused the owner of the chihuahua to roll around on the ground (in slow motion) to protect his dog. He bloodied his knee in the process. I had to grab mini with both hands by the face and peel her off the chihuahua. The sausages became unattended during the fray and came off the grill with one super crispy side.
• RV park was more about quiet relaxation while we were interested in loud exertion
• I transferred a Lions logo from our table cloth to the RV park’s plastic picnic table via our very hot table-top grill. Oopsy
• The left rear quarter panel of the truck high-fived a telephone pole

Warning: Lots of images coming up. They might looked jacked up depending on your internet connection. If so, just refresh your page a couple times. This will buy me some time until I’m able to put a fix in. Thanks! Fix is in!

Salem, MA

Boston, MA