A Weekend of Friends and Camping

This past weekend I went to Isle au Haut. Where and what is Isle au Haut you may ask yourself, well here is a map of where I am and where I went.

It is a two hour car ride to get to get to Stonington, which is where we catch the ferry. The ferry is a bit pricey, especially on a budget. It was a great weekend and thus worth the money.

The people who went:

Adam My roommate -

Maddie the ‘Intern’ & Jack the Cousin -

Mo the Trails girl -

Bernie the Sister -

What a cast of characters this was… Mo and Bernie have never been camping before so this was their first experience at anything approaching a camping experience. Maddie and Jack had been camping before so had Adam. This is the cabin that we stayed in, called the Eli Cabin:

It is a great place to go for a get away…there is no running water except for a stream out front, No electricity and there was a wood burning stove. There is also a view of the Ocean from the front porch. We slept six at the cabin, the sisters slept in the loft, I had the bottom bunk, Maddie had the top bunk, Jack had the tent on the porch and Adam had this Taj Mahal of a hammock that he slept in, her is a shot of us putting it up:

Bernie thought it was really cool and was the first person in it:

so after we got things settled around ‘camp’ we went down to the water and watched Huck Mo and Tom Bernie try their hand a rafting:

and then they tried it separately which was funny:

Unfortunately even solo the raft was a little tinsy weensy unstable:

Both sisters eventually gave up and just started ‘swimming’ with the raft.

Bernie and Mo came in and Jack wanted some of the action too so he tried his hand at the raft:

After we were done playing around at the water we went back up to the cabin and took shifts in changing in to some dry warm clothes and the cooking commenced. By all accounts I made a very delicious stew.

after sitting around and talking for a while we all bedded down for the night, couldn’t even tell you what time it was but it was dark.

Then next morning it down poured early we had a tarp over the hammock where Adam slept but it filled with water and dumped on top of him right at sunrise. he came walking in to the cabin and said' ‘ I got wet’ we all sat up and said ‘oh no’ and then promptly fell back to sleep. We finally rose after sunrise and started cooking breakfast.

When we finished breakfast we went out to hike it was still wet from the rain and there was a fog hanging around. We decided to go to Long Pond, found the trail and started. By the time we made it to the pond we were all soaked through. This was because the trail in a great many places was covered by blueberry bushes which were covered by rain. When we got to Long Pond we stopped for a swim in the fog. It was very … Bracing … aka COLD! At this point Mo and Bernie took off to head back to the mainland. They needed to go to church on Sunday but had to leave Saturday in order to make it…so we parted ways at the pond. so that left Maddie, Jack, Adam and I for the rest of the trip.

After we were done freezing…swimming…we took off again and finished our hike which included a 1.5 mile ‘shortcut’. needless to say we were all tired so we went down to the waters edge to hang out for a while…by this time the sun had come out and blessed us with a great day…We just sat on the beach and relaxed in the sun for a few hours, basically basking on the rocks like iguanas.

That night for dinner we had chili with hotdogs. Mo had made the chili the night before camping and had us bring it out. It was delicious and the four of us devoured all of it. we were stuffed.

We sat up late into the night chatting I also taught Maddie and Jack how to play euchre. it was a great ending to a really good day.

The following morning we had pop tarts for breakfast and began the laborious process of cleaning up the cabin and packing our things up to leave. there is a pack it out rule meaning you take out what you bring in…It was a lot of shit that we had. We had two miles of back breaking work to get all of our things back to the dock. and we barley made it in time.

One really cool thing that i have forgotten to mention, in the cabin are a set of journals that have been kept by the transients that have stayed at the cabin. It now holds entries by Bernie, Mo and Myself. the journal started in September of 1987. It has some interesting reading within those pages.

Here are two last image i will leave you with on of Jack recovering form the hike on the deck chair fo the ferry and on of Maddie and I sitting just in front of Jack.

  Jack is 18 and Yes he is starting Harvard in the fall.

And so we go!

Tomorrow I will get together some stuff from today's work list and yesterdays and post about them.

Till next time