The Great Outdoors

Before I begin this post on Thomas' and my camping adventure I have to share a special picture.  This is why you have your camera at all times people!  I was able to sneak a picture of this guy while in Cabela's outdoor store.  He looked about 60 and was wearing Chocs (which I must admit I fell victim to the craze years ago), two different color and height tall socks, knee braces, short shorts, a Joe Montana jersey, and best of all he was listening to a cassette player that was hooked to his jersey.  Cassette player?  Can anyone tell me when the last cassette tape was made?  I tried to look it up and could only find "late 90's.  So lets just say 15 years?  Beautiful!

So the journey continued as I drove to Thomas' house to head up to Maine for a little camping trip.  I realized this marked the 17th State I have been to in a little over a month (11 were in 6 days).  Hawaii, *California, *Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine.

*Notes only in airports, so don't REALLY count.

The site we camped the first night.

Thomas walking on the beach about a hundred feet below our campsite.

You can't hardly see but to the right middle just below the trees is our tent. Beautiful (during the summer).

The sun began to set soon after we set up.

It is humbling to view creation...

The next morning we rented a canoe and set out around the peninsula we were camping on.

Cool little house right on the water.

So...this is where it kind of got bad (where Thomas said he stopped having fun).  I had the great idea of taking our canoe to a couple islands...Thomas didn't care to share that he thought this was a terrible idea. You see I just came from Hawaii where we took kayaks out to a few islands...the only difference is that canoes are extremely top heavy and the water was 50 degrees here...

We made it around the inlet you see to the left and were headed to the island you see to the right when it became very apparent this was a TERRIBLE idea.  We almost lost it in the waves multiple times. We then had a wave hit us from the side when we were trying to turn around that splashed water all in our canoe and I still don't know how it didn't flip us.

We made it back to the mainland to enjoy our picnic and reevaluate our life decisions.  We realized that we were far from land and if we would have flipped we wouldn't have been able to get back in that thing with the waves hitting us.  We would of had to swim it all the way back to land in that freezing water...Well you live and learn, right?  Luckily we didn't suffer the full consequences.

There were tons of "lobstah" boats coming in from their early morning of fishing.  The sun came up about 4:30 each morning so they got started early.

This was where we camped the second night.  It was actually the highest point on the peninsula at about 130 feet.  Awesome views again.

After our exciting morning we decided to have a little reading time.

We wanted to get the full Maine experience.  So we pulled 3 "lobstahs" out of the freezing water (a cold tank) with our bare hands (there claws were rubber banded) and ate them (an old man boiled them for us).

We had a visitor to our tent the next morning.  We were considering eating him too but decided we might get in trouble since there were no hunting signs everywhere.

It was great bro time.  It will be a while before we'll get to do something like this again.