Hi, Friends -- I thought I'd begin our fall trip blogs with photos of Acadia National Park on the coast of northern Maine. We've been here for a full week which is quite a long time for us as we usually only stay in a particular place for a couple of days. But then we did get married here on Saturday which took up a little time. We've seen gorgeous, sunny days; rainy days like today; cold periods, in the 30's one night; and lots of wind. When we were on the top of Cadillac Mountain last night for the third night straight, it was blowing around 30 miles an hour with gusts a good bit higher. And we've loved every bit of it. When we got too cold, we head back to our cosy camper ... read more

The second part of our trip we visited Bob's friends around Vineland, NJ. On the way from PA, we spent some time in Cape May on the very tip of NJ and well known for its lovely old homes. The regal 1881 Queen Victoria features corner bay windows, a concave mansard roof, and a fancy console cornice. Cape May is a town-sized textbook of late-19th-century American domestic architecture. Its picturesque houses range from Stick Style and Queen Anne to Colonial Revival and beyond, with a generous helping of Second Empire-influenced Mansards tossed in. Thanks to a major preservation push in the 1970s, many of the town’s larger houses have been converted into bed-and-breakfasts, providing a bo... read more

The following is a description of the Mercer Museum in Doyletown, PA from their website. By 1897 handmade objects were being discarded in favor of new machine-made goods. Historian and archaeologist Henry Mercer (1856-1930) recognized the need to collect and preserve the outmoded material of daily life in America before it was swept away by the Industrial Revolution. Mercer gathered almost 30,000 items ranging from hand tools to horse-drawn vehicles and assembled this encyclopedic collection in a system of his own devising. To enhance the collection's educational value, and to share it with the public, Mercer decided to design and build a museum to display the artifacts. In 1916, Mercer erected a 6-story concrete castle. The towering central atrium of the Museum was used to hang the largest objects such as a whale boat, stage coach ... read more

Hi, All -- Here we are, back for our fourth year of TravelBlog-ing. This is our first blog of 2012, our "visiting trip" to spend time with Bob's sisters in PA and his friends in NJ -- and to see some sights to share with you in the process. We left home the 3rd of July, 2012, and were back home before the end of the month. By the way, if you don't want to receive these blog links, please let me know. Or I think you can unsubscribe yourself if you choose. In this day of way too many emails, I can well understand. These first few photos are from Gettysburg where we spent the night of the Fourth of July -- but, to our surprise, there were no fireworks, no nothing celebratory. They had ... read more

Here are a few odds and ends from our trip. You might note that one of the "sea things" had a little help from man. These were on the beach at Grand Manon Island. There's one blog yet to come -- the restoration of Cass, the old lumber / railroad town in West Virginia. Paula... read more