6 mountain peaks, 2 bridges, 1 pond , 1 day

On top of Cedar Swamp Mountain with a view of Sargent Mountain behind us

  We had a perfect day for hiking on our most recent day off, so we decided why climb just one mountian when you can climb 6 mountains in Acadia National Park. It only took us about 6 hours (ncluding lunch and breaks) and 7.5 miles, so it really wasn't that long! Most of the mountain peak trails here are pretty steep, but the mountains aren't that high and most of the trails aren't long. These mountains are all pretty close together and they all have beautiful views!

 On top Gilmore Mountain with views of Bald Mountain
on the left and Parkman Mountain on the right. It's not as far
as it looks between mountains.

On Sargent Mountain looking at Somes Sound

This is atop Penobscot Mountain with
Sargent Mountain in the background. The valleys are filled with
moss and lichen covered rocks, ferns and glacial boulders.

This is what one of the trails looked like. I guess that no one wanted to build an actual trail
so they just painted blue blazes here and there along the rocks.

Sargent Pond, a small pond hidden between Sargent and Penobscot mountains.

Mark on top of Cedar Swamp Mountain
with views of the Atlantic Ocean in the distance

 Six more peaks done, but we haven't climbed all the mountains in Acadia yet!  We still have a few to go!!

Carriage road bridges

Mainly in Maine

The Bubbles at Jordan Pond

     The Maine thing is to keep the Maine thing the Maine thing. I think Stephen Covey once said something like that, didn't he?
     So this summer finds us in the the great state of Maine. We are working as campground staff at a small campground near Ellsworth, in the Acadia National Park area. When I sit at my desk I look out at leaves blowing in the breeze, and our commute to work is to walk past 5 campsites and across the camp road (and sometimes through hoards of mosquitos). The campground is on a beautiful 749 acre lake called Patten Pond. We are here along with 4 other great workamper couples. The men spend their days mowing grass, trimming weeds, doing light maintenance and cleaning the bath house. The women make reservations, run the store and clean the rental units. We all get to ride around on golf carts while working, and we can enjoy the camp's canoes, kayaks and paddleboats on our time off. The water is finally getting warmer for swimming at our small beach.
     Spring came late here, but it was worth waiting for. The hillsides covered in lupine,

the lilacs, azaleas and rhododendrons were all so beautiful! We also had wild, pink lady slippers blooming right in the campground!

It's been cool and wet, which makes us appreciate the sunny days even more. The sun rises at about 5:00 am here because we are so far east, I've learned to cover the window to keep it a little darker in the camper. We want to go see the sunrise over the ocean, from the top of Cadillac mountain, but this time of year that would mean getting up before 4 am to drive to the island and up the mountain, so we may wait for fall when the days get a little shorter.  Cadillac Mountain is the highest point on the east coast, so it is one of the first spots in the U.S. to see the new day begin.

    We enjoy finding local activities, not just the tourist stuff, and there is a lot going on around the area. We attended a Saturday night contra dance at a local Grange Hall. Contra dancing is traditional partner dancing, similar to square dancing, with a caller, but you don't dance in squares. Instead, the sets are lines facing each other. You change partners as the dance goes along, and (sometimes) end up back with your original partner! There was live music, and it was well attended by young people! We have heard performances by several local musicians at the city park, the library, and a local brewery, and we went to a mystery evening at the library.  I also found a bell choir on Mount Desert Island that needed a sub for a concert so I got to play bells once more. The locals are friendly and welcoming.

This is a view from Ship Harbor trail

This is Bubble Rock at the top of South Bub

     Acadia National Park is beautiful, with miles of rugged coastline and ocean views from each mountain top. The trails are fun and challenging, even when you think you will just be wandering around a lake, you get to the back side and find yourself climbing on and around big boulders.
                                                                                                                                                                                           

 A very rocky trail at Tarn Lake 

 

The view from Beehive

Or when you are walking on carriage roads, you find yourself going in circles because there aren't many signs.
      We hiked "The Beehive" trail with the kids when they were here to visit. It has ladders and iron rungs to help hikers ascend the rocky ledges to great views of Sand Beach and Frenchman's Bay.






      We had a great visit with the kids and made sure they had some tasty lobster while they were here.

Schoodic Penninsula

        Our favorite food here is definitely lobster!!
We learned that the grocery stores will steam them for us, so all we have to do is enjoy!! The crab rolls, mussels and clams are pretty good, too.
     Well, we are only about half way through our season, so we have many more adventures to enjoy here in Maine. We'll keep you posted!

The kids on Patten Pond

 

 
   

Farming in Florida

 
      This new adventure first brought us to Kashi, an interfaith Ashram and intentional community in Sebastian, Florida, where they have a unique sustainable permaculture farming program. The Ashram's message is kindness, compassion, and service, and was a wonderful place to connect with nature.

There was so much abundant beauty at Kashi 

    We found this farm through a program called WWOOFing, which stands for WorldWide Opportunities on Organic Farms. At Kashi, we were given a place to park our camper (no hook-ups) and most of our food in exchange for working 5 1/2 hours a day, and five days a week, around the gardens. There are 9 abundant demonstration gardens with beautiful flowering trees and plants and delicious fruit and veggies. Each day was different, but a typical day at Kashi started at 7 am with meditation. Thirty minutes of daily meditation is part of the program (but it didn't have to be at 7 am). Then we usually met up with our team at 9 am to plan the morning and sometimes have discussions about life.  A typical morning  could include weeding, planting and mulching, planting seeds in the nursery, working in the greenhouse with the micro-greens, or harvesting purple sweet potatoes, or giant white sweet potatoes.

Giant white sweet potatoes, called Boniato

Mark helping to build a platform for a tiny home in the eco village

                               

We would usually work until about noon, then have a break for lunch, then work again from  2 until about 4:30. Then we usually tried to harvest some of our dinner from the gardens.  On the weekends there was an amazing chef that would cook wonderful vegetarian meals for the community. (Kashi is a vegetarian community.)

    Each week there were various yoga classes that we could attend in the evenings and on our days off. I was able to experience classes from 9 different teachers, some more than once.

That's me at the back left corner

Many evenings we would have a campfire, stargaze and listen to the coyotes that were
across the river .


 








  We were fortunate to be part of a farm to table meal fundraiser. We harvested, set up and served a wonderful meal. It included mint & lemon grass tea sweetened with fresh sugar cane juice that we pressed from cane with a hand cranked press.

Serving appetizers at the farm to table dinner

     The property consists of 80 acres, much of it still wild and swampy. We heard owls at night, saw all kinds of birds including bald eagles, swallow tail kites, hawks, and at least 3 varieties of wood peckers. There were rabbits, snakes, frogs, butterflies, endangered gopher tortoises and lots of cute little lizards.

An endangered gopher tortoise 

We were even lucky enough to see bobcats.

Mark was lucky to get a great view of this bobcat!

 
We kayaked on the Sebastian River and saw a really big gator and cute small ones too. We also went to the beach a couple of times.

The ocean at Golden Sands Beach, Sebastian, Florida

 

We attended the first weekend of a permaculture design class. If you are wondering what permaculture is, one definition says it's the development of agriculture ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self sufficient. But to us it is also a way to design gardens in harmony and symbiosis with nature.

This was where we hung out and cooked our meals 

     Sustainable Kashi was an amazing, sometimes challenging place to have our first wwoofing experience. Terry, who leads the program, teaches and shares his vast knowledge with his eco- interns as he likes to call us, and promotes healthy eating, sustainable living and community.  The eco village used solar panels to light the kitchen and the outdoor composting toilet (that didn't smell).

Quite a fancy composting toilet! And it didn't even smell bad!

They also collect rainwater when possible for washing dishes. We enjoyed showering in the outdoor showers that were open to the sky (and had nice hot water). We like our camper shower, but now I miss showering outside!

These are just some of the amazing people that we met at Kashi! That's Swami Nar in between Mark and I, then Simon, from France, and Angie.

     Our next stop was a much more traditional farm called 12 Seasons Farm in Fort Myers, Florida. Where Kashi had more demonstration gardens, 12 Seasons is a production farm. They grow heirloom tomatoes, about 9 varieties of cherry tomatoes, strawberries, citrus and many garden veggies like kale, lettuce, peppers, onions, cucumbers, peas, squash and eggplant. They also have papaya, banana and mango trees. We worked 5 hours a day, usually from 8:30 to 1:30, five days a week. We typically spent our days picking and packing cherry tomatoes and strawberries. We also thinned fruit and pruned tomato plants.

We would pick anywhere between 30 and 100 pounds of
cherry tomatoes.

 

Then we pinted them up for sale.

 Who would have thought we'd be farmers for 6 weeks this winter! We've eaten great fresh produce at both farms, and learned a bit about what it takes to run an organic farm (think fighting bugs). It was a warm winter in Florida and the bugs have thrived and eaten more tasty produce than we did.



 

Kale that was so big that it looks like little palm trees. They built bamboo
houses with bug netting around most of the tomatoes and the cucumbers.

We had a new "pet".

A pileated woodpecker

His name is Woody woodpecker. Yep, he's a beautiful, but crazy, pileated woodpecker. He loved our camper and his reflection! He thinks he's quite handsome and could spend quite a long time just looking at himself in the windows of our camper or the truck. His story is that he was born in a giant live oak tree that was right beside where our camper was parked. The tree was taken down, but Woody keeps coming home. But since his home was gone he would fly around the camper, land on the window sills and peck at the caulk around his favorite windows.

This is Woody on the window!

He doesn't know his own strength, so we were worried that he might just peck a hole right through the camper. First we tried putting netting over some of the windows, but he would just hang on the netting. So then we covered most of the windows with plastic bags. the camper looked silly, but it did help keep Woody away.
 




     We enjoyed the Fort Myers beaches, Sanibel Island, and kayaking the Orange River and Lover's Key State Park on our days off.

Beautiful day kayaking the Orange river

Kayaked with manatees at Lover's Key

Gators at Big Cypress Preserve

Great Egret shaking off water on Sanibel

Reddish heron

Osprey family at Lover's Key

We learned so much at the farms about organic farming, permaculture and sustainable living. We are grateful to our wwoofing hosts.

Winter Camp (like summer camp, but for adults)

   I always loved going to summer camp as a kid. Being outside, campfires, making new friends, canoeing, playing cards and learning new things was something to look forward to. Now as an adult I feel we've been given a gift of going back to camp. But it's better this time because we don't have to go back home, and back to school. We are home, and we have finished school.
     We came to Florida for the winter without much of a plan. Our only plans were to visit with friends in The Villages for the New Year, then we hoped to find work at Disney World. Unfortunately, they aren't hiring seasonal employees at Disney right now, so that didn't work out.

Had a great time visiting with our friends!!

     We had found a reasonably priced campground about a half hour from our friends and booked 4 nights there. It's an older campground with lots of mature trees, and the sites aren't all in orderly rows, which gives it more of a community feeling. We checked out a couple other campgrounds in the area, but the activities here included a weekly guided kayak trip and yoga twice a week, so I thought " this was the place for us!" We also found a friendly, welcoming, active community and more than a month later we are still here.
    Most days we've been busy enough at the campground that we just wouldn't have had time to work while we are here! So we've been relaxing and enjoying for 1 1/2 months, knowing that we do need to continue working for our plan to succeed.
     We are having fun trying to learn to line dance, but what we've learned is that we will need a lot more practice to make some of the dances look easy! There are short walking trails that we enjoy on one side of the campground, and the Withlacoochee river is on the other side of the campground. It's quick and easy to have our inflatable kayaks on the river.

Paddling back to the campground from the Withlacoochee River

The area where we paddle is a relatively undeveloped part of the river and we have seen a variety of interesting birds, and sometimes even an alligator (but we're not quite sure if that's a good thing or not).

This was a little gator, think he was only 3-4 foot long

This bird is called a limpkin, he hangs out right on the water by the campground

Great blue heron

    Each person we've met at the campground has an interesting story and life lessons to share. We especially appreciate all the folks that share their talents teaching the various activities here to help us broaden our horizons, and all the folks who make delicious food for the social hours and cooking club.  We've also had fun with our friends who taught us new games like Tuc (it's like Trouble with a deck of cards) and Hand and Foot (a card game). We've gone on group hikes and done crafts.

Saw this anhinga at the campground pond

    We look forward to Fridays when we go kayaking with our friends to different rivers around the area. Loved going to the Weeki Wachi River where the water was so clear and we felt like we were in the jungle.

Kayaking the Weeki Wachi River

We also went to Crystal River twice to see the manatees, the first time the ocean must have been too warm and so the manatees hadn't come in to the springs that day. The second time we went there were plenty of manatees and plenty of people too. But we enjoyed kayaking with the manatees! They are such gentle beautiful animals.

Three Sisters Spring on the Crystal River

 

     We had a group of 18 of us, from the campground, that kayaked down the Rainbow River. The river was so clear that we could watch the turtles swimming below us. There was wildlife to see everywhere we looked! We saw whole groups of turtles sunning themselves, a small cormorant rookery, and we even got to see otters playing in the water!!

Part of our group going down the Rainbow River

  

A cormorant and a pile of turtles

   
   
   
    "Winter camp" is ending for us soon so that we can continue on our adventure. Soon we will be "WWOOFing," which stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. We will be living and working on farms in exchange for a place to park our camper and food. We are looking forward to eating lots of fresh produce that we will help grow and harvest on the farms. We will also be learning about permaculture and sustainability.