The Beginning

In 2005, my parents began building a retirement home in Topsfield, Maine, up in Washington County, right next to the vacation spot of my youth. Every summer growing up, from the time I was around nine years old to the time I left for college, my family would head up to The Birches, a house keeping cabin vacation spot on East Musquash Lake in Topsfield. The road trip up there each summer left indelible memories. My father typically stayed up until 2 am the night prior to beginning the vacation packing every nook and cranny of our 14 foot Lund which we hauled up with us. We’d pack so much gear that an outside observer might think we were moving. But it was only the pack-rat nature of my parents, who to this day haven’t really thrown anything away, that made the job of packing that much more challenging and time consuming. One year, my father had packed our poor boat so full that the weight caused the trailer springs to break half way to Maine. None of us were really surprised. We spent two days trying to get the trailer fixed before finishing the trip.
Those childhood trips were so much fun. My father, a rabid antique collector, had to make his traditional stops at most antique stores we passed doubling the time it took us to reach our destinations. He would make bold statements like, “I’ll only be twenty minutes,” only to return 2 hours later thoroughly frustrating my mother and us boys. But my father loved the hunt of the bargain, finding unique antiques that sold for under their value. The hunt for antiques was part of his vacation. The stops that my brothers and I always loved were the sporting goods/outdoorsman shop stops. There were two such stops on the way to Maine, one at the Kittery Trading Post in Kittery, Maine and one at L.L. Bean in Freeport. At one of these two stores, I got my first knife, first backpacking pack, first B.B. Gun, first fishing rod, and countless other boyhood treasures.
I always looked forward to these stops. My father and the three of us brothers were like kids in a candy store, wide eyed and full of imagination at all the gear. There was no adventure that we couldn’t handle in our minds with what we saw. My poor mother, the sole female in a family of five would typically stay with our dog, Thistle, in the car. Staying in the car turned out to make these stops more miserable for my mother as we would make statements like, “We’ll only be an hour,” and then be gone for half the day. Even more to her chagrin, L.L. Bean stayed open for 24 hours so it didn’t matter what time of day or night we pulled into Freeport each summer.
It had been over 11 years since I was last in Topsfield and during that trip, I flew into Bangor and only made the return road trip back to Rochester with my family. The last time I actually drove up to Topsfield was perhaps in 1994. I greatly looked forward to the opportunity of retracing that childhood trip with my parents. This was also to be the first time I saw my parents’ retirement house. The major construction had been completed and the outside was finished including the roof, siding and deck. Most of what remained was interior finishing work. My parents decided to take a week off in early September to work on the interior. This provided me a unique opportunity to begin my cross country odyssey in Maine during my terminal leave. So, on Thursday, August 30th, I dropped my motorcycle off in San Diego to be shipped to Topsfield. I bought a one-way ticket to Rochester, NY for $122. After arriving in Rochester, I helped my parents pack and the three of us left for Topsfield on September 8th.
After finishing a week of working on my parents house in Topsfield, Maine, I prepared to depart for my two month adventure. My brother was to accompany me for the first week.