Spring in Central Park

We decided to get a visit to the temple in before the baby came. Such a treat. Ira and I enjoyed our early morning walk through Central Park where spring was starting to unfold. We even caught some of the New York St. Patrick's Day Parade, picture are in our St. Patrick's day post.

Ira liked the pond with the Ducks

 I enjoyed seeing the green lace on the trees and the emerging flowers.

 

 Some early morning hockey. It was pretty with all of the mist coming off the ice.

 It was tricky trying to capture the moment with my cellphone, but I liked the way this one turned out, with the city and nature merging in the early morning light.

Bluegrass, Water Falls, and Stone Sculptures

Labor day marks the unofficial end of summer and the beginning of fall. We are now mostly settled in as you can tell from Sharon's video tour of our new place and so we start the New England chapter of our life. We are looking forward to getting to know the surrounding area better and have a good start on it. We visited Maine last week and loved it. This weekend we have been exploring areas closer to us as the roads are busy with all of the holiday travelers. We started out at a little State Park where there is a series of small water falls that cascade down the mountain side called, Kent Falls. It was a beautiful day and as you can see in the pictures below the park was pleasant.

The park below the falls was busy with people picnicking and playing frisbee. The hike up to see the other parts of the falls wasn't as busy, which was nice.

I loved this cute little covered bridge. There are supposedly a lot of covered bridges still in use in the area, I'm hoping to get around to seeing some of them.

Ira feeding himself, he's really getting into this. We'll post some video of him later.

Kent Falls is about a quarter mile of stream cascading down the limestone rock through potholes and down slippery slopes. It reminded me of some of the canyons I've hiked in Southern Utah, just in limestone surrounded by forest instead of in desert sandstone.

We discovered a side trail that took us through this amazing stone sculpture garden, I guess you could call them karen's(trail markers) but they were the most elaborate ones I've ever seen and were everywhere, but the trail.

 How many can you count in the background?

And these were some of the simpler ones...

Some were small, others were quite tall.

After the park we headed over to Sherman, one of the small downs just outside of Danbury, to enjoy some bluegrass/folk music. The music and atmosphere were wonderful. It was put on in a small 'clubhouse' (really more of a barn/cabin) by an excellent group of musicians next to a beautiful lake. The music was cheerful with the audience clapping along enjoying in the marry tunes. The musicians told how a few of them meet riding the trains into New York City to play on Broadway for shows like The Jersey Boys and The Color Purple.

Our drive back took us along a twisty tree covered road I can't wait to go back to when the leaves start to change colors.

Portland, ME

There are a lot of places that we want to go to in close proximity to Danbury. One of my best friend, Dave Sutherland, was finishing a short medical stint in Portland, Maine so we decided to make our first trip up there to see him. It was great to visit with Dave and explore a little piece of the eastern most state. The weather was beautiful and the food was wonderful. The pictures below tells our story well.

We drove half way up Thursday evening and stayed the night in Massachusetts. The campground was nice, I think we missed all the summer traffic. We stayed in this one room cabin for the night, it made things easier with Ira.

Friday we finished our drive up and meet Dave on the Eastern Promenade. Ira was a good sport, so was Dave. We were happy the got along so well.

We took a ferry to Peaks Island to explore the Island life of the Northeastern United States. Ira was cute on the boat and maybe a little sea sick...

There were these cool scooner boats you could get rides on, we didn't do it this time around.

Dave was our Portland, ME expert tour guide. I really enjoyed hanging out with him.

After about three years of searching for a good sun hat, Sharon finally found one on the island.  It turns out to be the old lady hat of choice there. 

The guys exploring the Island coast.

The ferocious coastal wildlife. Don't be deceived.

Saturday morning we headed out to the Bradbury State Park and did this grueling .3 mile and couple hundred foot elevation hike to the top of Bradbury Peak. Okay, so it wasn't all that scary, just Dave at the top. You could see the ocean off in the distance.

Fate would have it that on our way to Bradbury we discovered a little community celebration of Fun Day! That's right, Fun Day. We couldn't help but humor fate by stopping in to get in on the fun. The main(e) event was the local dog show complete with course. We enjoyed the fire departments juicy hamburgers and I quote, their "wicked good, fresh, dug up three days ago from a local farm" french fries. I might be biased as an Idahoan, but they weren't all they were hyped up to be. The hamburger and root beer float were excellent.

 I do have to insert the irony of the state of ice cream in Maine. While on the Island the day before we got some great fresh fruit pies 'a la mode' (with ice cream) however, the ice cream was more...I mean all cream and no ice. We decided later that night to try again at the famous Friendly's restaurant, but to our great astonishment the ice cream didn't make it intact yet again. The irony of the story comes in at Fun Day. The ice cream in our root beer floats was solid and as icy as ice cream comes, the one ice cream dessert where you really just want the cream to make your root beer more tasty.

A trip to Maine wouldn't be complete without a visit to a lighthouse. This one is the most picturesque in all of Maine. It was very scenic. It was also nice to sit next to the ocean and listen to the waves crashing on the jagged shore.