We're here! It took about 4 hours. Busy unloading crap from the car into the camper. We're on plot PT-50A, which is basically a mobile home. (Same place as last year.) Lotta unpacking to do now.

Joining us are my in-laws (Patty's parents, her sister Barbara and her kids, her other sister Kris and Kris' husband Mike and their kids).

Unfortunately we forgot to bring the remote for our kitchen TV. So I had to make a trip to Wal*Mart in Norway, ME to get a universal remote, because our piece of crap Toshiba television has no way via the buttons on the front panel to tell it to switch over from the antenna to the auxiliary line in. Estupido. I idly considered buying a new television instead because the Toshiba is so janky… it has a built in VCR which works poorly and often the audio from the tapes sounds bad, but in the end I decided on just the remote. It turned out that worked fine.

Now Lynnea can play her xbox games while I enjoy Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I'm about a third of the way through.

Well this is it! It's July 23rd, it's about 2 in the afternoon – heh we're leaving like three hours later than we wanted to. Typical. But we are on our way. We are headed to Waterford Maine, and will be staying at lovely Papoose Pond–and we won't be coming back until next Saturday, July 30. We just left the house!

Last minute preparations included finding kennels for the dogs, finding friends to look after our horrific cat, Maya. We wanted to find some kids to look after the guinea pig but Lynnea insisted on bringing the pig with us… so we are taking a guinea pig camping. I'm sure that will be a delight.

Patty and I packed up everything, we're bringing a color television and an xbox. We're bringing some really great games and movies… movies I always like to watch, Let it Ride, A Few Good Men and stuff like that. We went around the house with these gizmos with timers that you plug into outlets around the house that will switch things on and off and try to create the illusion that someone is home. We have a lamp that will switch on and off in our living room, another that will switch on and off upstairs, a radio that comes on twice a day in the kitchen, and one of the air conditioners upstairs will come on for a couple hours each night. It probably won't be convincing, but it's sensible to do. Our front porch light was burned out so we replaced that.

Lotta stuff, took a long time but we got it all done and we only fought once. And now, we are on the road. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince sits on my lap just waiting for me to get started.