Jenn Martinelli Blogging in Boston

I wanted to put up a Colorbox gallery of photos following Rob's tutorial on how to do so, so I picked a few favorites from our backpacking trip in Baxter State Park in Maine last summer. Click on the photo below for the mini gallery (now with titles!).

I highly recommend Baxter, it's big and very undeveloped and beautiful.

So we went to Smuggler's Notch on January 17th on a trip that was supposed to be for two days. The first day we had a lot of fun even though it rained at the end of the afternoon.

Unfortunately, that meant the next day everything was a sheet of ice. The good news is they gave us vouchers to come back another time. The bad news is we wasted our money renting a car for 2 days and on a hotel to stay there overnight.

However, we got to prove how hard core we were by snowboarding in the rain for about an hour and a half. See?

Seriously, I don't need any convincing. But I'll take the free gift I suppose.

...that I am anxiously awaiting the opening of all resorts in New England!

Two snowmaking days already?

You're insane but I kind of love you.

Yeah, I know some of you whiners out there are already complaining because the temperature is getting cooler. I personally love the fall so I have no room for your complaints. The summer is hot and humid and disgusting and does nothing for me. So.

However, today I am not talking about fall but winter - glorious winter with its freezing temperatures and heaps of snow, especially in the mountains of New England, for me to snowboard on!

Nate's mad skillz at Stowe last season (January 2011).

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We had a great first camping expedition this summer. OK, ever. I have been camping before, as mentioned previously (a lot), and Rob has been at least a couple times as a kid, but we have never gone together.

Sunday we took the ferry to Georges Island and from there to Grape Island, our camping destination for the night. Once we had picked out our site (number 10) and set up our tent, we went off to explore the beach:

We found a shady spot and made a test campfire. The only place you can make an open flame on this island is on the beach below the high tide line. So we made a small fire to test our campfire skills, which proved to be excellent! Actually Rob was the superstar fire maker and later, chef.

After practicing our fire making and walking in the water up to about mid-calf, we put our shoes back on and took off to explore more. It was nearly high tide but it had retreated a little, so we decided to walk around the outer edge of the whole island. There were a few tricky spots where we had to basically climb through low-hanging trees, but we made it!

We then went back to our campsite to rest for a bit and hang out in the tent:

Around 5:45 or so we headed back to the beach to build a bigger campfire with plans to heat up some pizza we brought from home with us, and make smores and watch a movie on the iPad. Camping 2011 style!

Check out our mad pizza heating up skills. Rob built a sort of rock oven to heat up the pizza on. It really worked pretty well.

After pizza, it was time for s'mores!

Around sunset we wrapped it up and headed back to camp where we had an almost scary adventure.

We went back to our tent, got it all set up to be ready for bed, and finished watching our movie. Then we of course watched a second movie. Hey, what can I say? We love watching movies! But, during this whole process we got creeped out. Here's why: we kept hearing strange sounds we couldn't identify. After stopping the movie to listen to them probably a dozen times, the best we could determine, they were coming from people somewhere, but it wasn't fellow campers on the island. It kind of sounded to me like a PA system or like someone showing an outdoor movie. Like what I imagine it might sound like to be about a half mile away from the Free Friday Flicks outdoor movies at the Hatch Shell in Boston, without city sounds to interfere. It never got any louder or closer and I was content to ignore it but Rob kept wanting to stop and listen which was creeping me out. It made him feel better but me more creeped out. So in the end he stopped making us listen to it.

We had one major equipment failure which is that we didn't bring a flashlight with us. Luckily, we had my handy iPhone, which we used to make an extremely creepy trip to the composting toilet before bed. We were good and freaked out! However, we slept well once we went back to the tent and lay down. In the morning we slept in a bit and then packed up and headed down to the pier to wait for the ferry.

Here was our view this morning waiting for the ferry to take us back to Georges Island and then Boston.

I was kind of tempted to just stay. We are looking forward to our next camping adventure in July, where we will stay 2 nights on Lovell's Island. Have any of you been? If so, leave a comment about it.

So finally (hey, there were thousands to sort through!) here are our edited galleries of our midseason trip to Stowe.

These are being posted partially to get everyone psyched up for what will hopefully be (we are still in final planning stages) a big fun last hurrah return trip to Stowe this weekend!

Nate, Dan and Melanie - enjoy and get psyched!

Day Zero (the trip up Sunday night, 1/30/2011)

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Here are some movies Rob made of all our photos from our Stowe trip! Each photo is displayed for only .3 seconds (so don't blink or you'll miss a bunch).

This montage includes every photo Rob took so expect to see some that are less than great.

We'll be cutting the number of photos down and posting traditional photo galleries asap.

Day 1

We arrive and everything goes pretty much according to plan. The weather was cold but bright and sunny, and Stowe was all but abandoned. We thought conditions were good but we wouldn't know what good is until later in the week.

Days 2 - 4 after the jump.

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Many more to come folks... I have problems weeding photos out. I'll post more as soon as I can. I might let Rob Reed help!

Anyway, this first gallery is mostly of our trip down, no action shots yet. Many more to come!