Lost the Colony

So I guess we didn't have beginners luck on this one. We just went out to our hive and found that the whole thing is basically gone. No brood, no signs of a queen. Lots and lots of wax moth larvae. There are a few bees but we suspect they are only robbers or the remnants of the hive coming back to salvage as much as possible. There is maybe two tablespoons of honey left. 3 weeks ago there were full frames of honey. It is definitely a blow to us. Right now just trying to learn from the mistakes we made and salvage as much equipment as we can for next year.

The chickens seem to be experts on digging out the wax moth larvae from the wax. I'm feeling vindictive and let them just gobble them up.

Heading Home- Vacation Part 8

After getting out of the hotel as quick as we could we headed for Johnstown Flood National Memorial. The Johnstown flood was caused by a dam failing after days of heavy rain and years of neglect to the dam. 20 million tons of water headed down the valley crushing small towns with its 40 foot high wall of surging water. By the time it reached Johnstown is was a colossal mess of debris and water. When it hit Johnstown it knocked down boilers that set the swirling litter of debris and bodies on fire. Over 2,200 people were killed. Many felt that the owners of the dam, the South Fork Fishing and Hinting Club and its wealthy members, were to blame for the catastrophic failure due to their failure to properly maintain and equip the dam. They were never found legally responsible.

A view of the valley near the town Saint Michael where the lake was in 1889, taken from the top of the remnants of the earthen dam that broke. 

Leaving Johnstown we set our sights on home. We made a pit stop at Cabellas in West Virginia and found an excellent two burner propane range to brew beer on and can on. After spending some time in the store we moved on again. We stopped in Columbus and ate skyline and then stopped again near the Ohio Renaissance fairgrounds to watch the Perseid Meteor shower. We pulled off on a small country road between two cornfields and laid on the back of my car and watched the hundreds of shooting stars crisscross the sky. It was a beautiful end to a great trip.

Scranton Sucks - Vacation Part 7

We were surprised again when we woke up at Lake St. George. Who knew that we would be able to see the lake from our close-to-the-highway site. We moved on pretty quickly (after enjoying there awesome shower houses) and headed to Lowell National Historic Park which is nestled just north of Boston in Lowell.   We only saw a small portion of this historic park and I look forward to going back when the weather is nicer and I have more energy. The park is spread out throughout the city highlighting different parts of the textile industries growth and decline in Lowell, the heart of the US textile industry in 1850. The only part of the large park that we visited was the Boott Cotton Mills Museum where we watched power looms do their work. It was cool to see 1800's machinery at work.

The video shows the machinery moving and you can hear the sound, but the feel of those machines in your ears and feet and lungs, I can't imagine working there everyday like many young women did.

We left Lowell and decided to head to Scranton, a middle ground between Boston and Pittsburgh  We also decided to just get a hotel since it was going to be pretty late when we got into Scranton. We headed to a Best Western and walked in to get a room. Sold out. We had the lady call a few other hotels. Sold out. We tried about 30 hotels and motels. Sold out. We had to drive another hour before we found a hotel with a room left. A king suite, smoking. At two in the morning it sounded fine. Stupid Scranton.

Canadaish - Vacation Part 6

Cobscook turned out to be an absolutely amazing campground. All the spots were really nice and there was water everywhere. Our site ended up being really close to the shower houses which was convenient  Going to take a shower resulted in some hilarious people watching of the women who were using their electric coffee pot in the bathroom because that was where the electric was. Not to mention the line of people trying to charge their iPhone. Apparently everyone with AT&T was on international roaming because we were so close to the Canadian border.

After we cleaned ourselves we headed to St Croix Island International Historic Site. There wasn't a whole lot to see here. The island is not visit-able because of its fragile nature. They had a short interpretive walk with some interesting statues that were covered in white furry caterpillars.   The story of St Croix is the story of some super stubborn Frenchmen. They found this island and were like 'yeah here looks good' and the native Passamaquoddys were like, 'um you probably shouldn't stay there this winter.' And the french were like, 'But it is defensible! what do you know!' Then 35 out of the 79 men died when the water around them froze and became impassable to the mainland... Which happened to be the only source of freshwater.

A view of St Croix Island at low tide. The near bank is USA the far bank is Canada. 

After St Croix we headed to one of the bridges that would allow us to enter Canada's Campobello Island so we could visit Roosevelt Campobello International Park. The park is interesting because it in Canada but dedicated to FDR and therefore the park talks a lot about the history of the relationship between the US and Canada. They have restored Roosevelt's summer cottage (all three stories and 34 rooms) and have many items that once belonged to the president and his family and tell his story in relation to Campobello. The most notable part of which was his contracting polio in 1921. Mostly it made me wish that I could have been around in the 1920's and had a lot of money so I could have bought a "cottage" on an island for a summer home.

We made it back through customs. And started heading south. We arrived out our campground, Lake St George State Park, just before it started to rain and set up camp in the headlights of our car in a light drizzle. The camp site we found was maybe 20 feet away from the highway, pretty different from Cobscook.

Words that start with Schoo - Vacation Part 5

Our camp ground at Lamoine State Park wasn't much but they did have a nice beach that we took advantage of with a nice walk in the morning. After that we headed on to the Schoodic Peninsula. This is part of Acadia National Park but is about an hour from the main part on Mt Desert Island. The Peninsula was much quieter. We took advice from a ranger to go there during low tide when you can walk to Moose Island and do some tide pooling. This was a lot of fun and I could have spent all day doing it. I found an anemone and a starfish! As well as thousands of snails and crabs!

We left in a bit of a hurry to head back to Bar Harbor, the town on Mount Desert Island. This was because we had made reservations on the historic 4 mast Schooner!

This is a picture of the Schooner we took a ride on. I took this the day before right when we arrived in Acadia!

 The boat ride was beautiful  We were able to cruse around a small Island without an engine running. What ended up being super cool was seeing a pod of porpoise feeding off the starboard side of the boat. I'm pretty sure the kayakers just thought we thought they were super freaking cool.

The small black dot below the kayaks is a porpoise surfacing!

After we got off the schooner and fought our way out of crazy busy Bar Harbor we headed to the quiet side of Mount Desert Island. The west side of the Island is far less traveled and touristy than the east side. On our way we stopped at the Atlantic Brewing Company and had a beer tasting and ate some amazing BBQ before continuing on. Again we took a rangers advice and climbed Beech Mountain up to the fire tower. It was a great hike with some beautiful achievements in trail workmanship. We were in a bit of a rush since sunset was approaching quickly. The view was worth it and we lingered here longer than we probably should have. It was pretty dark by time we found the parking lot again.

View from the top of Beech Mountain 

Pulling out of the parking lot we waved goodbye to beautiful Acadia and promised we would visit again. We began what turned out to be a very long and foggy drive north to Cobscook State Park. We pulled into the campground well after ten pm. There was no one to be found. No directions for the campground other than a list of how many bushels of clams you were aloud to take from the water. We drove in following signs. There was no one. Anywhere. Dan got out to look at a campsite. He disappeared for ten minutes. The campsite was set 100 yards off the road in a very wooded pine grove. We finally passed a site that was on the road. Still no people. I then told Dan that we were going to drive around the campground till we found people. If there were no people we weren't staying. Well eventually we found people and went back to the site on the road that we had found earlier. We set up camp and crawled exhausted into the tent. As I laid there, in the giant pine forest I noticed that there was not a sound in the park. No rustling leaves. No wind. No crickets. No engines. No people. I whispered to Dan, "There is no noise in this campground. It is creepy." On cue a nearby owl goes WHO-who-who. Dan replies, "There's an owl." I think this is by far his favorite part of the vacation.

Acadia- Vacation Part 4

Well we didn't quiet make it into Maine. We stopped at Moose Brook State Park in New Hampshire to pitch our tent and sleep for the night. After setting up in the now customary darkness we walked out to a field and put the picnic blanket down and watched hundreds of shooting stars cross the sky. Eventually, being in the mountains, we got cold and headed in for the night. The following morning we made a friend who was interested in Dan, and in what Dan was cooking .

And then we moved on to Maine. For real this time. We knew we were getting close to Acadia because the gas prices kept creeping up slowly. After some serious traffic we made it over the bridge to Mount Desert Island. We decided to go to the Hulls Cove Visitor Center to see about getting some lodging for the night at one of the two campgrounds. We waited in line for about 15 minutes before discovering that they were both booked. For the rest of the week. So we decided to go ahead and do the driving tour of the main, and very very busy, part of the Island and call around campgrounds in the area to see where we could sleep. The driving tour was very pretty and there was a lot to see but I do recommend not going during the peak week, like we did. For dinner we went to the Jordan Pond House and had popovers and soup out on the lawn. And then took a short walk to the pond to see the bubbles. Which are actually small mountains.

After that we made the drive up to Cadillac mountain for sunset. I guess it is a more popular place to watch sunrise as it is the first place the light falls on the United States. Sunset was quiet a spectacle however, our sunset even got a standing ovation from the massive crowd. No encore unfortunately.

After driving down Cadillac mountain we headed off the Island. We had reserved a "spot" at a campground called Lamoine State Park. It was about an hour long drive so once again we arrived after dark. I call it a "spot" because when we called to reserve it the kind ranger on the phone said " we have a spot left but it's really no good unless you really just need a place to sleep for the night". We were sold.

Welcome to the 20th Century- Vacation Part 3

After leaving Saratoga we continued North along the Hudson River. Along the way of Rt 4 we were hit by an exceptional storm. We pulled the car over to the side of the road near the bank of the Hudson and for nearly 20 minutes watched the storm rage around us. After that we decided that this would make a good first night in a hotel. We stopped at a Best Western just inside Vermont.
Our first stop the following day was the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park. This is a park dedicated to three owners of one house. George Marsh, Frederick Billings and Laurence Rockefeller all at some point owned the house. Their common mission was land stewardship. We took a hike on one of the carriage roads up to what they called the Pouge. It was basically a good sized pond that supplied water to the house and other buildings and water troughs. Quick history lesson: Mr. Billings also held huge investments in the oil and railroad industries at the same time he was committing  himself to land stewardship. Conflict of interests? Anyway Laurence was widely known  as a philanthropist and helped create many of the national parks as we see them today by buying and donating land (most notably in the Grand Tetons). He donated the house at the national park in 1992 and he officially moved out and handed the keys to the national park service in 2001.

The Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller House. We took a tour but no photos inside are permitted.

Dan and I at the Pouge taken by two very nice ladies from New Hampshire who sat with us while we made a revolutionary lunch of spaghetti-o's and ravioli.

After returning from our hike and hopping in our car we sped out of Vermont and headed to New Hampshire (which wasn't far away). We drove over a covered wooden bridge to enter New Hampshire and once again arrived at the park almost at closing time. Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site proved more interesting than I originally thought. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was a sculptor and the historic site was where he did much of his work and lived for much of his life. There are many replicas and originals of his works scattered through out the grounds and buildings of the park. We rushed through many of the buildings because they closed at 4:30, but the grounds were open till dusk so we had plenty of time to explore them. History lesson: Mr Saint-Gaudens did many famous sculptures that you may recognize of President Lincoln and coin proofs like the $20 gold piece called the double eagle. He also happened to do the bronze face casting that we had seen a few days previously at the James Garfield NHS.

After leaving Saint-Gaudens (well after everyone else) we headed back the way that we came. And we saw that covered bridge. And our jaws dropped. Coming from the other direction it hadn't seemed all that interesting. Yes covered bridges are cool. However, this one was 449 feet long and built in 1866. After getting out of our car to take some pictures of this remarkable feat of 1866 engineering and throwing off the super excited and overly friendly bridge hunters (escaping them, not literally throwing them off the bridge)- we headed onward to Maine.

Notice the boater. And the fact that it didn't fit in the picture.

We fought here- Vacation Part 2

Our next stop was sort of unplanned in central New York in a town called Rome.It was unplanned because we ended up camping about 5 miles away from it in a state park where we got the last camp site. The place was called Fort Stanwix. It nestles itself between two rivers where one needs to portage, or cross the land, with a boat to get from one to the other (that used to be a big deal).Your history lesson: it was only called Stanwix when the British owned it during the French and Indian War. However since the Patriots took over the fort during the revolution, they decided that calling it after some British guy that they probably didn't like was a poor idea. So they renamed it Fort Schuyler. Go ahead pronounce Schuyler. I bet you didn't say "Sky-lar". Well that is how you pronounce it. Apparently in the English language if you put the letters schu it makes a "skuh" sound. Anyway the fort effectively halted the British forces during the revolution which helped the Patriots win victories at other battlefields like Saratoga (foreshadowing).

No it isn't an out house it is a guard shack. It sits on one of the bastions (that means corner that sticks out)

Our next stop was (did you guess it?) Saratoga! After finally escaping Fort Stanwix and their insanely friendly park ranger we headed to Saratoga. We finally were able to do our first hike here! We did a loop called the Wilkinson Trail. It wound us through many of the prominent areas of the two battles. Your quick history lesson: Saratoga was where the French decided that well, maybe those rebel Patriots really do have a chance of beating up those danged British guys that are really irking us at the moment. Why not help them? Once the French were on our side we had a fighting chance for Independence.Most of the world sees the American Revolution not as a war between Britain and Americans, but rather between Britain and France.
We missed the driving tour at Saratoga because our hike took a while, and we didn't realize the tour road closed at 7pm.

One of the stops on the Wilkinson Trial. The letters corresponded to a guide that told you what was going on

looks like a cannon

Dead Presidents- Vacation Part1

The James A. Garfield National Historic Site is nestled in the burbs of Cleveland Ohio. It was the first stop on our short anticipated trip to Maine. WE spent the night at Dan's parents house south of Cleveland and made the drive early. Early enough that the visitor center wasn't open when we got there. We wandered around the grounds till the visitor center opened and got in line (I suppose it was a Saturday...) for a tour of the house. Your quick history lesson: James Garfield was the "front porch" guy. It was the front porch of this house he gave his campaign speeches from. He was the first president that actually spoke for himself. He was shot in office but didn't die right away. He actually probably would have lived if the doctors had just left him alone. But alas medicine isn't what it is now back in 1881.

 Just in case you were curious what a man who had been shot and bedridden for a long time looked like, they took a cast of his face just after he passed.

The famous front porch. 

Moving right along we drove to New York in a hurry to arrive before the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site. Apparently we just barely made it in time. We were the only people there, but there was a nice staff of half a dozen park employees to help us. Unfortunately there was not much to see. There we doing a renovation so everything was moved away or covered with blue fabric. Out tour guide was very interesting though. His tour was more like him acting out a diary than a tour. History lesson: President McKinley was shot. Roosevelt rushed to him as the VP to see if there was anything he could do. McKinley appeared to be on the mends to a full recovery so Roosevelt left for vacation. Unfortunately he had to turn around and hurry right back in his vacation clothes because McKinley died. He borrowed a suit for the official swearing in. 

the Wilcox house.. where inside a president was sworn into office... after borrowing some nice clothes.. They do have a really catchy logo.