Vermont!

 Brad and I took a weekend trip to Vermont to go camping in mid-September.  We were surprised to see that the leaves were well into their color change, since there was no change just a couple hours south in Newport.  The weather was beautiful for our weekend.

We drove to camp at Emerald Lake State Park just north of Manchester, VT.  This State Park is great with heated showers, lots of trees, a beautiful lake with paddle boats, canoes and picnic areas.  We arrived fairly late friday night (getting there at 9 p.m.).  Since we had made reservations we headed right to our site, to find the area deserted, all the other campers and RVs at the park were in the other areas.  Setting up our tent we started our campfire and took it easy.

The next morning, after getting up we headed to Manchester for breakfast.  Manchester, VT is an interesting place with many high end outlet stores and restaurants.  We ate breakfast at the eclectic little restaurant called Up For Breakfast.  Not only is it a cool name, you had to go upstairs to the second floor to get there.  We then walked around the town and checked out some stores, including a neat bookstore and some cool antique shops.

 Since one of the reasons I picked this place to go was so we could hike to Lye Brook Falls, we headed off up the trail.  We found some neat rocks (collecting rocks is a new hobby of ours) and enjoyed being in the woods.  The waterfall itself was a bit disappointing and the hike there is almost all uphill, so we didn't enjoy it as much as we wanted to, but it was beautiful in the woods on a beautiful day with the colors changing all around us.  We then went back to our campsite to enjoy steak and potatoes for supper cooked over the campfire, with a bottle of Chianti Classico :-) accompanying it.

 The next day we packed up our campsite and headed back, planning to spend the day stopping at anything that struck our fancy on the drive back.  After getting breakfast at a neat donut shop in town, we headed out.  We stopped at covered bridges, looked for rocks in river beds, checked out antique shops, and more.

At one antique shop we found a big ship's wheel at a bargain price and bought that as well as a 1943 edition of the Bluejacket's Manual.  This place had an old barn with a bunch of stuff in it, in addition to the house filled with antiques.  The barn was creepy, with the boards bending significantly under our weight, with no lights and FILLED with stuff.  Brad was scared he'd fall through!

USS CONSTITUTION

Brad and I were able to go to the USS CONSTITUTION for a tour.  The Commanding Officer, Tim Cooper, was a department head with me on ANZIO.  It was good to get to catch up with him, but then he gave us the grand tour.  We went all over "Old Ironsides" from the bilges to the Captain's Cabin, to everywhere else.  Tim's shared his knowledge of this wonderful old ship and slice of history with us.  Here are some interesting things about her:
- the bilges were filled with rocks and gravel that would be shifted around to hold the cargo securely.  (The cargo mostly being food and water).
- there is one stove - a big open stove that would feed the 500 member crew.
- the crew would only get to sleep 4 hours a night in two watches, the rest were sailing the ship
- the hull is made of three layers - the outside and inside are horizontal layers of white oak, and the center layer is vertical layers of live oak, one of the hardest woods in the world.  For construction, they would take a template of the piece needed for the live oak and find a tree that met the shape.
- the architect added innovative diagonal risers inside the hull to keep her keel from hogging, a design he took from looking at how church domes were held up in Norway
- she fires her canon at 8:00 and sunset to hold colors twice a day  (I wish we still did this on all our ships!)
- the Captain's Cabin has two rooms, one on each side, that extend out on the sides of the ships.  On the seats in these rooms you can pick up the cushions and have access to personal commodes  (everyone else was using the head of the ship - known as "Seats of Ease"
- the surgeon would operate in a space that was a half deck, and about 4-1/2 to 5 feet in height (Brad was stooping good).  Most of the deck spaces had overheads about 5'8" tall, I know because I could walk under them without hitting my head...barely.

Some more modern facts: there are 70 Sailors that are assigned to CONSTITUTION, since she's still a commissioned ship in the Navy - the oldest commissioned ship in the world.  Half of those Sailors live in the barracks right there at the Navy Yard in Boston.  She's undergoing a three year refit that will finish sometime next year and is looking great!

Blog name change

Well, we no longer live in Stuttgart, so we're changing our blog to "The Bufkin Tales".  Next week I'll change the title to http://bufkintales.blogspot.com/  If you don't find us here, make sure you check that new address.

Italy Trip Part II: Cinque Terre

On the second day of our vacation (June 20th to be exact) to Italy, we went to Cinque Terre.  This stretch of the Italian Rivera is often featured in movies since it's so beautiful with all the multicolored buildings clinging to the rocky coastline.  Cinque Terre is made up of five coastal cities, we parked at Volastra - a city on top of one of the hills, then walked down to Manarola.  A decent of 1100 feet and about 1-1/2 miles, which we felt for days in our shins and Brad's knee.  (Later we did take a bus back, a bus we would have taken down if we'd been able to find the stop...)

These cities are all about the views - beautiful.  Our day was spent hiking around looking at the beautiful scenery, with time spent enjoying a wonderful Italian lunch and awesome homemade Italian Gelato (Ice Cream).  The pictures tell the story.

There was one final funny thing that happened - on the bus drive back we watched easily 50 people trying to shove on board a 15 passenger bus.  Thank goodness we were early and got seats!!

Italy Trip Part I: Driving South and Camping

This is going to be a multi-part Blog for our family vacation to Italy, we did so much in just eight short days!! 

We drove south through Switzerland (about a 7-1/2 hour drive from Stuttgart).  It was a cold, rainy day with low hanging clouds hugging the tops of the mountains.  We had to arrive in Camp Darby, Livorno, Italy by 5:00 p.m. to check out our tent from Outdoor Rec, but otherwise we had no plans for the first day.  What we didn't plan on was traffic in Switzerland.  They have timed lights limiting how much traffic can go into the tunnels at a time.  I guess the backup is so common there is this cheesy traffic mannequin to slow you down.  It took about 1-1/2 hours longer than we planned to get through - we kept waiting to see what caused it and never did.  I guess if you exceed the traffic allowed by the timed lights things just back up - what a stupid system!!

We arrived at Camp Darby where we camped out for the first five nights of our trip.  This Army base is about 4 miles from the Mediterranean Coast, perfectly situated for seeing Tuscany and mid-Italy.  When we checked in, they suggested we sleep in the gym the first night since bad weather was expected.  Since this sounded absolutely no fun at all, as the hardy campers we are, we ignored their advice and set up our tents.  We had our backpacking tent with us and checked a larger 4-6 man tent from outdoor rec.  Our tent went up in under 2 minutes and did not move in the wind at all.  Their tent, though, was old and as we set it up some of the nylon straps just came apart.  Because of our delay in Switzerland, Outdoor Rec was closed by this time so we couldn't get another one, but with a little jury rigging, we got it all set up.  The girls stayed in our very solid, reliable hiking tent - only suffering a water casualty the second night when they left a bunch of stuff against the tent walls, resulting in daytime rain coming in until the floor was flooded.  The Coleman tent that we rented though, folded way in during the night, almost collapsing multiple times, but our extra lines, held down by a cement bar and the heavy metal picnic table, saved the day.  It also started pouring hard during the night - fortunately not at the same time as the wind!  Brad and I survived the night, the girls didn't even notice the wind and rain!

It was great to have a base of operations, a place to cook out burgers, dogs, etc., to make morning coffee, cook smores, and to start our daily ventures from.  Other things that happened to us at Camp Darby were - attending a Carnival the first night; seeing the cars with big stereo's; Macie locking the keys in the car while we were doing Laundry (as she put in on facebook, "Locking the keys in the car: Fail.  Locking the keys in the car when the spare set is in another country: Epic Fail."); Brad saving the day by opening the car door with a hanger; great big pinecones falling from the huge Italian Umbrella Pine trees (this is where pine nuts come from - also know as coniferous seeds on one menu) - including one under our tent floor; teaching everyone how to play Hearts; the somewhat nasty bathrooms and showers; me working on a gift baby blanket; and the 200+ teenagers with a church group also camping out and their noisy buses parked right next to us.