Wow... I'm touched.. There have been so many emails and comments from people, kinda make ya go all squiffy! So in answer to some of the many comments:
Blippie... It did rain here too...once! ;-) But apparently we are in for a big storm tonight.
Margery... Smarty pants... the brakes on my bike are hydraulic. At the moment I have no idea how to bleed bike brakes, it's probably the same principal as Landy brake, but at the mo they work... if I mess with them, well, who knows!
Dave, my bikin buddy!... Yeah, got a new bikin jacket, some padded shorts and all sorts... its so cheap over here.
Dad...Did you shut the windows when you left? ;-)
Mum... Yep, Jen is here with me, she's live and kickin! She very rarely lets me take pics of her :-( But heres one, taken tonight at the camp site in New Hampshite, in a town called Conway. We splashed out tonight and got an expensive camp pitch with our own access to the river and everything!


There also seems to be an abundence of exceedingly large camper vans here... I mean, check this puppy out...
I mean, this just ain't camping, is it. That thing has gotta have its own zip code (post code to you lot!) and more square footage than my entire house!

Heavy day of biking tomorrow (hopefully), thanks for the comments, keep 'em coming.

Nighty night ;-)

Hersey's Shocker!

I couldn't believe it! I found some Cadbury's Dairy Milk!!! ...but no. It was made by Hersey's! What mean and evil fate was that?! Luckily, I checked the back after a bad encounter with some Rolo's. I am sad, but my waistline is not ;) :D

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

Its a bit fishy round 'ere

Ha haaaa... we be in Cape Cod! Right at the end of the land bit, a nice town called Provincetown. It's a bit like Brighton, but with New England style houses.
So, today we popped into the Land Rover dealer at Cape Cod. Charlie, having had his gearbox replaced just before we left and now having covered just over a thousand miles was due a gearbox oil change. The chaps at the dealership were amazed. Most had never seen a real live 110, let alone a Camel, so after lots of picture taking, they finally got on with the wrong job... they changed the engine oil, D'oh! No worries, I pointed out that it was the gearbox oil we wanted changed and they jumped into action again, but this time without the photo session.


We also popped into a bike shop near a place called Mashpee (tee hee... I love that name!!). Here I found a lovely bike for me, and Jen ordered the bike she has been after. With the exchange rates the way they are at the moment, we have both managed to get excellent bikes for a lot less than the UK value. Only trouble is, the brakes are round the wrong way... I tried to pull a skid and nearly flew over the handlebars instead. LOL.

So we are here in Provicetown (where the pilgrims first landed) at the Dunes Edge camp site, until tomorrow afternoon when Jens bike should be ready. In the meantime, she's gotta ride my old boneshaker. We are planning on taking in some of the dunes here in the morning before heading back towards the mainland.


The last couple of nights we have spent at State Park camsites. These vary in quality but are remarkably cheap, about £7-£8 per night. The private camp sites like this one here are a little more pricey... about £15 - £20... and they charge you a quarter for 3 minutes in the shower. Back to the State Parks tomorrow then ;-)

Gotta go, the midgeys are lunching on me big style despite the jungle formula insect repellant and Jen is giving me "eyes" 'cos I'm using the lappy!

Night night everybody :-)

We're on the road!

Wahoo! Finally :)

We picked Charlie the Camel up on Friday morning and it looks like he came out the container unscathed which was excellent news for us, only thing was all the little 'Land Rover Spiders' (part number AEU28570) had loved having the 110 all to themselves so the little hoover Nan and Granddad gave me came in quite useful for getting rid of all the cobwebs! :)

We hit the road... and then turned around! Dan had left his phone on the seat of the car which belonged to the nice lady from the container transporting company! A quick phonecall from the office later and she returned (very kind of her) to Dan looking sheepish. The people we have dealt with regarding the shipping have all been very friendly and tolerant so for that we are very grateful.

When we finally got on the road again we decided to hit the intersate. Having spent 2 weeks in New York/New Jersey and Maryland we wanted to start heading north. Luckily the interstates are easy to understand and we soon found ourselves heading for the first campsite in Andover (lol!) New Jersey, Panther Lake. A private site with lots of lovely lakes and stuff, but more important - BLACK BEARS! I couldn't belive it, I thought we had at least a few weeks before we reached bear country, but apparently not. I spent so much time organising getting here I really should of done more research into what's actually here. Still, the frige is air-tight and we followed all instructions so got through the night without being eaten ;)

After 2 weeks of lovely weather it's only right that I should tell you it poured down all night! Massive thunderstorms and pathways that turned into rivers, but being in the rooftent we had no problems :)

The next day we headed off north again, taking the local roads this time. We also managed to find a mall in which i brought excellent lighter trousers (Jeans not funny in this weather) and nike stuff for about 98p... :) The scenery's lovely, the houses amazing and last night we also discovered the joys of State Park campsites :) Clean showers and toilets with beautiful scenery all for £8 a night for both of us. Bargain. Will try to use more of them.

We're spending today doing some scenic trails and driving towards Cape Cod which we aim to hit tomorrow as we were told it was best to avoid at the weekends. Either tomorrow of tuesday we're getting our Mountain Bikes (as nothing's open today - Sunday) so we can do some of the lovely trails we've aready found.

We've discovered all Holiday Inn's have free internet and are handily advertised everywhere, so should be able to update the blog with relative frequency, will sort some pics out for next time too :)

The end is near...

Of our wait, that is. Had a phone call from Bridget this afternoon, we will be getting picked up at 10am from the hotel lobby tomorrow morning and taken to the warehouse to collect Charlie Camel! So please excuse me while I go all American for a moment... WHOOP, YEAH, OH MY GAAAAAAD, WHOOP!!! :-)

The cities we've been to have been fantastic, but we hoped to be on the road a week ago, so we are kinda looking forward to tomorrow!

The temperature here in Baltimore at the mo is about 88, so we're off for a swim before going out to celebrate :-)

..The Cheesecake Factory! Oh, and Baltimore..

We tend to avoid the 'chain' resturants if we can, but we've heard people talking about 'The Cheescake Factory' around here so we thought it would be worth checking out :)

It was. The food was excellent and there was a huge choice, it's the first time since we've arrived that to be honest, it would have been satisfactory to order one main meal and a side salad for both of us. We've got by so far by only having breakfast and one main meal but even that today was far too much. Luckily enough, the waiter guy Jeff was a good man and put the rest of the lovely cheescakes we'd ordered for pudding in a little carton for breakfast! lol! Cheesecake for breakfast. Perfeck. (note to self: Go to gym tomorrow)

As for Baltimore, we arrived back this afternoon to the news that Charlie had cleared customs - WAHOO! Just got to wait for him to be transported to the collection area now, which with anyluck will happen tomorrow and we can (fingers and toes crossed) pick him up on Friday.

We explored Inner Harbour tonight, there was a baseball match going on but being more of a basketball girl we avoided that and took a stroll instead. Lots of streetside entertainers (including an excellent Doo-Wop group and a little Dave wannabe playing with fire). Lovely atmosphere but we'll head back there tomorrow for a better look and trip to the aquarium during the day.