Breanne's Vacation

Breanne had vacation this week so on Monday morning we headed north. We played a couple rounds of minigolf at Deb's in Randolph and chatted with Jen for a while then ate dinner with my parents and stayed the night in Gardiner.
Early the next morning we headed up to The Forks, despite the bad weather. We got there around 11 am and soon decided to push our bike ride up a day and make the trip to Greenville. We'd been planning to do the trip at some point during the week and it wasn't raining and reasonably warm so we figured it was as good a time as any.
We left the car at the east end of Brochu road. The weather was pretty nice, little bits of rainfall here and there. It's a fairly hard ride, with several long hills and loose soil which makes it harder for the tires to find purchase and ascend. Breanne is just learning to use the gears on her bikes and she's picking up quickly. I had to wait for her at the top of a lot of the hills but she never gave up even on the biggest, steepest ones.
At one point in the trip I feared I'd taken a wrong turn. I remembered coasting by a small "Y" in the road and the more I thought about it the bigger the Y grew until I was convinced I'd chosen the wrong arm. Eventually I saw the Greenville dump sign though and knew we were only a few miles from Greenville and the southern tip of Moosehead lake. We finally got into town, hit tar, and rolled under the railroad bridge and up to Kelly's Landing in Greenville.
We both had the seafood chowder for an appetizer while a Michael McDonald song played on the radio. Breanne didn't like her meal, something deep fried, but I enjoyed my clam strips. At one point we heard "Break my Stride" by Matthew Wilder. We split an enormous ice cream sundae, which is what I think didn't agree with Breanne. Ice cream and seafood don't usually mix well.
It started to rain the second we started on the return trip, and then an absolute flood started falling on us. It poured the entire road back which made the riding difficult and a bit dangerous at times, but in time we rounded the last corner and saw the CRV waiting for us in a puddle. We were both drenched to the core. I forgot to mention it, but we saw two moose on the trip- one on the way there, one on the way back. I almost hit the one on the way there as I didn't see it because I was looking over my shoulder at Breanne. The moose was looking at Breanne too and it wasn't until she screamed that the beast and I saw each other and averted a collision.
Back at the camp I started a fire and we ate some pizza that Breanne cooked on top of the wood stove. We played some cribbage and listened to the Sox beat up on Burnett and the Yankees and we both fell asleep quickly. I was awoken in the night by the radio suddenly blaring on but it was fortunate because I was able to stoke the fire and get it roaring again.
We woke up to more rain the next day and decided to go kayaking. The water was rough and again we got wet but it was a good time. We paddled out to the widest and deepest part of the lake, beyond the narrowest spot which lies just to the left of our dock. The water was choppy and extremely black and the sky was thick with clouds, no sunshine passing through. We fed some ducks off the dock too. A mother and 9 ducklings. One duckling was distant from the rest, didn't go for the bread unless you landed it at it's feet and didn't seem to take to the water like the rest of them. I thought it might be blind or dim.
We decided to cut the trip short after going inside. The rain showed no sign of stopping and Breanne was anxious to get to Hodgdon and see her family. We packed everything up, cleaned up the camp, and hit the road by 1 or so. We took the back way to Bingham, following the Troutdale road, and took route 2 out Skowhegan towards Newport, where we got on 95. We found out the next day that about an hour or so before we passed through Skowhegan there had been an armed robbery at a bank downtown. Ski masks, motorcycles and rifles and we'd missed the whole thing.
It was 6:45 when we pulled in the driveway in Hodgdon. It was nice to see Tim and Kathy again and we all watched the Sox defeat the Yanks before hitting the hay.
Did all sorts of stuff up in Hodgdon: visited her Memere and Pepe, checked out Shin falls east of Patten, went to an Amish store, went to Volumes where I bought a thick Movie Guide book (info on most every film released up until 2002) and Forrest Gump- I've always wanted to read that, made a shoe shelf with much help from Breanne's dad, played a lot of bullshit and other card games, ran around with her dog Bella and the neighbor's dog Abby, annoyed their cat Spike with a Casio keyboard, ate a lot of Moxie floats, and watched the Penguins win the Stanley cup.
On the way home we met my mom in Augusta and Breanne bought a bike helmet and my mom got me some cleats for softball. She owed me a pair because she donated mine without asking me while I was in California. I was going to use them today (Sunday) but the double-header got rained out.