Here we are, sitting in the parking lot of the Wal*Mart in Presque Isle, Maine, getting ready to head into our July project at Baptist Park Camp tomorrow, and I’m realizing I haven’t even shared about our great time at Pilgrim Pines Conference Center. Plus we made a couple of fun stops along the way here to Northern Maine (Aroostook County – the largest county east of the Mississippi – about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined) that I wanted to share so……..
Pilgrim Pines Conference Center

What a blessing it was to work at this camp! First of all we made some great new SOWER friends – John and Joyce M.. Joyce is a professional quilter, so we needless to say, we hit it off right away! Secondly, the work was interesting and diverse – always a good thing! Gary and John stayed busy doing a variety of jobs, from installing lattice around some cabins to building some great new (and very needed) steps to assembling bunkbeds for the living quarters under the new dining hall in the lower part of the camp. (There are actually two camps at Pilgrim Pines. Camp Squanto is their youth camp and until the new dining hall was built, it was a summer only facility.

With the addition of this great new building they now can use that part of the camp all year! The other part of the camp is the Family Camp area – which includes the Mayflower Lodge

several lakeside cottages along with some condo-type housing and several other hillside cottages.)

Joyce and I did a little bit of light housekeeping, peeled some carrots and cut some lettuce, and helped out in the office. But we finished off the project with a whole lot of shredding!

Certainly well within my “skill set”!
The staff was delightful, and while their official summer camp season starts this coming weekend, we did get to see the summer staff arrive and begin their training.

It looked to me like they were all in for a great summer!
Pilgrim Pines also hosts several Road Scholar (Elderhostle) programs during their non-camping season. Those looked very interesting – I might have to do a little more research in that!
Great project, great friends, great blessings! And if you’d like to see some more pictures, HERE you go!
(Of course, another wonderful part of this project was that it was only 2 hrs. from our cabin in Vermont. But if you’ve been stopping by here lately, I think you probably figured that out!!)
We left Pilgrim Pines on Monday and had a nice leisurely drive across New Hampshire and then into Maine.

And since we have some SOWER friends that are also “Maine-iacs” , we were able to stop and see them along the way. First up were Nancy and Harley, who are parked at their son’s home not too far into the state. The camera never made it out, but we had a delightful visit – meeting some of their family, hearing what all they’ve been up to since we’d seen them last, and enjoying a great seafood dinner at their favorite local restaurant. Yum! We left their driveway Tuesday morning, and started the northward trek.
I guess you know it’s pretty hard to go Maine and NOT stop at LL Bean in Freeport, right?


Freeport is a fun little town (especially if you’re into shopping), but we found other things that were camera worthy (well, at least cell phone camera!) – like these beautiful mountain laurel.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen ones quite that color before!
(Guess what – there are more Freeport pictures HERE - but not too many, honest!)
Ok, from Freeport it was on to our next Sower Stop – Mary and Roy W., just outside of the little town of Clinton, right off of 95. Again, it was a sweet time of fellowship and catching up (we hadn’t seen these folks in a couple of years!). We chatted while we watched the birds at the bird feeder

and ended the day with a stroll over to their daughter’s house to see her beautiful gardens -


(even the cat likes these gardens!).
It was a pretty quick visit, but we’re so glad we stopped! (And if you’d like to see some more bird and garden pictures – HERE you go!)

So that pretty much brings us up to today.

It was nice to break up the drive with visits with friends (and a couple fun stores to boot!), and we’re thankful to have safely arrived in this little corner of Maine. We hit some drizzly rain as we drove north, but it wasn’t until we stopped that the heavens really opened up with heavy heavy rain for a couple of hours. We were VERY thankful that we were sitting still!

Tomorrow will bring a new adventure – the start of another project. Our co-workers this month have been delayed, so we’ll be by ourselves for the first week. But not to worry, I’m sure we’ll be kept busy! And with the holiday weekend, I’m trust there will be some Independence Day activities we can enjoy. Have a nice long weekend, everyone! Happy Birthday, America!

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Saturday we took one last (well, until the end of August) drive up to Bradford, VT, for a day at the Cabin with ALL of my siblings and their spouses! What a treat! We left early Saturday so we could stop at the Fairlee Diner in (you guessed it) Fairlee, VT (about 8 miles south of Bradford).

Although this lacks the classic “Diner Car” look on the outside, it is Diner All The Way on the inside-

(That’s real Vermont Maple Syrup in that little container )
Breakfast was a real treat – blueberry pancakes for Gary and a wonderful cheddar/spinach omelet for me. Yum. Yum. Yum.

We were set until dinner!
I couldn’t resist just one shot of the row of counter-sitters – This was one hoppin’ place on a Saturday morning!

But, of course, the main event of the day was not Breakfast, it was an afternoon with my siblings and their spouses. Although the four of us siblings have been pretty regular in getting together each year (it’s pretty easy during Girls’ Week since Dewey lives about an hour away and we get together to talk over any “Cabin business”), to have us all there with our husbands and wife is a whole other story. I can’t tell you we accomplished great things or solved any of the world’s problems, but we did spend lots of time catching up with each other, comparing memories (it’s really amazing how the same event is remembered differently by each of us!), and looking forward to what is ahead for each of our families. We shared a delicious meal, enjoyed some late afternoon sunshine (after 3 days of rain so that was real treat), and thoroughly enjoyed each other! Here we are -

Not a bad looking group for a bunch of “Seniors”, if I don’t say so myself!
We have been so blessed to have this cabin property in our family (thanks to my grandparents!) -

but oh, even that blessing pales in comparison to the blessing of being part of this family!
Love. You. Guys.

I’ve known some exceptional Dads in my day. Not perfect by any means, but exceptional nonetheless.
There was my Dad -

He taught me to work hard, laugh often, and cook with garlic. He was a good man, and I miss him.
Then there is the father of my children -

He taught our children the value of doing your best, how to play a mean game of Pong and PacMan, and the joys of riding a go-cart in the back yard. His motto to our boys has always been – “I’ve tried to do a better job as a father than my Dad, and I expect you to do a better job than I’ve done with you.” I love this man.
Of course, there’s our son, Toby -

He became a dad over eight years ago (and has added a son since this picture of him with his three girls), and has been a great Dad. I’m not saying he’s perfect, but he loves those kidlins more than life itself. And I know he takes his turn with the diapers and middle of the night chores too! It’s been a joy to watch him grow into fatherhood with each new baby and with each new stage of their lives.
And then there’s the young one – Josiah -

This is his first Fathers’ Day. Well, I guess technicnally it’s a pre-Fathers’ Day this year, but since I know how much he loves his bride, I know how much he already loves that little boy he has yet to meet.

Little Baby C, you’re getting a great Dad!!!

Happy Fathers’ Day, everyone!

OK, so maybe you didn’t really miss me, but I missed you! Well, a little anyway. Several times during the week I thought about posting a little blurb about the wonderful week I was having with my sisters. Maybe share about our long mornings in front of the fire enjoying our coffee and then how we just moved to the front lawn and sat in the sunshine and tried to identify birds. And then suddenly it was 1 PM! Ah, the excitement of Girls’ Week. I did a terrible job of “documenting” our week – no official Sisters Picture, no picture of our time with Aunt Berta and cousins Dorothy and Catherine, no pictures of the family gathering we had on Saturday. Really, a terrible job. But, since I couldn’t let the entire week go entirely undocumented, here are a couple of random shots that I did manage to take. There were the birds….

(an Eastern Phoebe, I believe)

(and that’s a Yellow-bellied sapsucker, doncha know)
And then the flora -

The beautiful Blue Flags that are starting to ring the pond

and along the edge there are the sundews – an honest to goodness carnivorous plant living right in our little corner of the world. Who knew? (They are pretty small, actually, but pretty darn interesting!) Some of them are even enjoying a meal!
And then there were the sunsets…..


Oh, yeah, the sunsets.
And then there was the precious sister time. As expected, we did lots of laughing. Some down-right-tears-running-down-our cheeks-laughing. We did some serious talking too – sharing how the Lord has been working in our lives this past year. The ups and the downs. The praises and the petitions. We took care of some cabin business (always some of that to do), and were very thankful for Gary who came and mowed the grass when he dropped me off and then mowed again (best he could in the rain) when he came to pick me up. We stayed up late (well, for us anyway), slept in as much as possible with those birds waking up with the sunrise, and took our fair share of naps. We played games in the evenings, sang through our favorite hymns a couple of nights, and ended each night with thankful hearts. We are so blessed to have this treasure we call The Cabin, but more importantly we are blessed to have this treasure called Family.

Oh, and did I mention we ate a fair bit of chocolate, too?
After all, it was Girls’ Week!