From 'old' to New Hampshire...

Well, it's been a busy few days!

As rightly deserved though, the first paragraph of this blog will be dedicated to 'Stumpy'. I can do that as I've got the laptop. Hahahaa. Stumpy is a most excellent (in true Bill 'n Ted style) mountain bike that I happened to have purchased with all my hard earnt overtime money :) For those who know about these things and to bore those who don't here are a few facts: He's an M5 Alloy Hardtail, Fox F90 Front shocks (with lockout), Avid SD-5R cantilever brakes (will upgrade this having tried Dan's), SRAM X-9 rear derailleur and X-7 Gear levers ...and now Dan's nagging me for getting geeky, so here's a link: My bike

And a piccie from Cape Ann :) (yes, I know the saddles horrible and I've already changed the peddles as I'm too much of a wimp to ride with clips!)


We left Cape Cod on ...er.. I've no idea as I'm on holiday! A few days ago anyway, and headed up the coast a little to north of Boston. We'd heard the Whale watching was fantasic in this area of the world, so decided to spend a couple of nights in Gloucester (isn't it just enough to make you feel at home :) ) next to Manchester (on-sea lol). We had a couple of jobs to do on Charlie Camel, namely checking all the oils and changing the rear brake pads as we'd forgotten to do them before we left home. We could combine this with the Whale Watching and not have to rush off to find a site afterwards. As it was we found a lovely site on Cape Ann with our own little wooded area adn campfire facilites - toasted Marshmallows all 'round :)

The Whale watching was, quite simply, amazing :) We weren't expecting to see an awful lot as we thought it was probably quite hard to find them, but the trip consited of (from memory..) 9 Humpbacks, 3 Fins (the 2nd biggest animal in the world) and 4 Minke's. Wow. The first lot we saw we pulled in close and it was a Humpback 'tail slapping', apparenlty the marine experts are still unsure why they do this, but in this case it looked like communication as there was another doing the same thing about 300m away and another even further in the distance. Later on, we saw these four together which is apparently also unusal! The trip consisted of tail slapping, water spurts, feeding and waving! lol! That's something I don't think we'll ever forget.
Tail Slapping:

For a little perspective!:

Feeding:


Today we rose bright and early (nothing to do with the quarrying and explosives going on down the road... and headed for New Hampshire and Maine. Maine is somewhere I'd always wanted to go as due to my sick facination for easy-reading horror I wanted to visit some of the sites from the Steven King books! (yeah, I know, but it's my holiday!) Ogunquit proved the closest and from one of my favourite books - The Stand (as I know some of you reading this will know) the 'home' of Fran Goldsmith and Harold Lauder. The Rough Guide also said it was a beautiful town with a 3 mile sand spit for a beach... and it certainly was :) Typical New England boarded houses, temps of 98 degrees white sand and crystal water, it was a hard afternoon ;) :)

After that we were itching for some of the true Land Rover type holiday stuff, so I now find myself writing this blog in the White Mountains of New Hampshire (and hoping there is not a big black bear behind me...). We spent this afternoon stocking up and tomorrow we'll be heading off into the National Park for a few days of 'proper' camping, trail finding and Mountain biking. If we don't get eaten by bears hopefully I'll be updating this in a few days! ;) :)

A quick thanks to everyone who's sent comments, it's great to hear from you all :) And for your info Mum, ok, it wasn't 98p in the Nike shop, but I still got 3x pair of trousers for less than £20! :) And for everyone to whom I promised postcards, they are written (in some cases like JW's there's several!) I just can't find a post office :( Will send asap.

Jen