Our semi-annual church yard sale was the first week of the month, and on Friday I took Clara with me when I picked her up from school for us to get a hotdog for lunch (it was a half-day since fall break was the next week.) Her Great Aunt Christy was there – I’d seen her before I left to go pick up Clara, & she said she would wait to see her before she left – and I got this cute picture of them together. She always called Clara her Little Cotton Ball 🙂

I have been having some trouble with my camera off & one for the past month, but finally worked this morning & got pictures downloaded from about the past month. Here are a couple of action pictures of Adam – #50 – and his 9th grade Bearcat teammates in action against the Andrew Jackson JV team. You can tell in this first one that Adam looked like David against Goliath with that guy he was going up against, but as the game went on Adam figured out how to get around him, & Bearcats came out with a big win.

Our star after the game…

We spent our last full day of the tour in Newport, Rhode Island. It was another day where it rained off & on, but we took a bus tour around the coast. The views of the ocean were beautiful, and saw LOTS of sailboats. The first picture is looking through all of the masts of boats that were tied up at the harbor. The other two are just the ocean and those beautiful black rocks that we all up and down the coast on this trip.

On our way out of Maine we drove through the beautiful towns of Kennebunk and Kennebunkport. None of the Bushes were there, but I did get this picture of their compound – from a distance 🙂

It was raining by the time we got to Boston, so the pictures of our bus tour didn’t turn out great. It had slowed to a drizzle by the time we got to Fenway Park, so we had just a couple of minutes to get out and make pictures, and I got this one of the statue of Carl Yastrzemski.

I had no idea that cruise ships departed from Portland, ME. I’d love to know more about it – where they go, etc. It looked like a big ship, though, so it must be a pretty popular place.

Supper that night was a traditional Maine lobster dinner, with dessert made with Maine blueberries. It was yummy. Meg & I had gotten us a piece of Maine blueberry pie to go at lunch earlier in the day that we had for a snack the next day. The blueberries there are different than here – so tiny but so yummy. Wonderful day.

We were in Maine for the fifth day of our New England tour, starting in Freeport, where we visited the LL Bean Flagship store. I took this picture of the moose head on display when I first walked in the door, before I realized that there were animal heads on every wall 🙂

That afternoon we were in Portland, where we took a Harbor Lights cruise, & saw some of the beautiful seascapes in the area. I never did manage to get a picture of the waves crashing on those black rocks – I was too mesmerized to ever get my camera out in time. It was beautiful, though.

The smallest lighthouse in Maine – and there are many. I loved that this was included on our tour 🙂

The afternoon we were in New Hampshire we spent riding the cog train to the top of Mount Washington, the tallest mountain in the northeast, and spending some time exploring at the summit. There trees covered in berries on the ride up. They were so pretty, and I cannot for the life of me remember what they were called.

We got this picture of Meg & me when we made it to the stop 🙂

The train that took us there. What a great day.

Wednesday morning we headed out early for New Hampshire. We stopped at a covered bridge – we saw several of them over the course of the trip, and every one was different, and I loved every one of them.

We stopped at an overlook on the Kancamagus Highway – absolutely beautiful views.

Loved seeing the white bark of the birch trees and the leaves changing colors more every day as we were traveling along.

The third day of our trip found us in New Hampshire, where we spent the morning exploring the Billings Farm & Museum in Woodstock. It was a huge farm originally belonging to Fredrick Billings, who bought the property in 1869. He was one of the first farmers in the country to study and practice land conservation and farming practices that supported that. His granddaughter Mary married Laurence Rockefeller, and eventually they donated the mansion they built there on the property and surrounding acreage to become Vermont’s first national park. There was a lot of interesting family history in that museum.

There was an entire floor dedicated to rural life in New Hampshire over the decades. Of course I loved reading about schooling over the years.

After visiting the museum we spent a couple of hours exploring downtown Woodstock. It was a beautiful little town, and of course the lunch we found to enjoy was delicious as always 🙂