May 17 – 19 – Durham, NH
From Westhampton to Durham is a fairly short drive, although it does include the Boston ring road,which I drove. Fortunately traffic was light, but there were still a lot of merging cars. Also fortunately, I am getting more used to driving our rig.
The sides of the road have great stretches of what look like snow drifts, which prove to be the result of masses of this tiny wildflower. If you look closely in the photo, you can see the penny that I put in for scale. These flowers also grow in my yard, but they are a pale blue color in PA.
Chuck’s sister Karen is both the mother of the new graduate and the family organizer. In preparation for this trip, she visited the campground and picked out 3 adjacent sites for herself, us and Chuck’s parents. Due to the wet weather, the campground moved us, but kept us together. This was convenient for meals, campfires and celebrations.
I got the good news that my doctor appointment in State College had been moved up to May 23. This made me quite happy, as the original date was May 30, which meant we would not be able to head out to the main part of our trip until June 1. We promptly made a reservation to camp on the Canadian side of Thousand Islands from May 21 through the end of the Memorial Day Weekend. It is only a 5 hour drive (excluding border crossing) to State College, so we will drive home on the 22nd and back on the 24th. And then the real adventure will begin.
Elisabeth was the first to arrive, by train from Boston. After we set up camp, we picked her up from the station and brought her to the RV. This was her 3rd time RVing with us, so she knows the routine.
Chuck’s parents showed up next, followed by Karen, her significant other, Ed, her son, Jake (whose graduation we attended on our last trip) and Annie, best friend of the graduate, Jill.
A fire was built in the fire pit, pizza was ordered and too much pizza and S’mores were consumed until the fire died down. Remarkably, no rain fell and the black flies, which were plentiful, were not biting.
Graduation day dawned with blue skies and warmth (both of which have been rare on the trip to date). We headed off with the family (joined by sister-in-law Michelle and her son Sam) to the UNH football stadium for the graduation ceremony.
Every school does things differently — the main wisdom seems to be that even the happy families cannot be expected to sit for more than 90 minutes. In the case of UNH, there is only one ceremony for everyone (with the possible exception of the professional schools). This is a lot of students, so they compensate by calling names only for Ph.D. graduates. Otherwise, the degrees were conferred en mass.
The commencement address was given by columnist and political pundit David Brooks. Both his jokes and his theme (bringing people together) were better than most of these talks.
After the formal graduation, we met up with Jill’s boyfriend, Jordan and walked across the pretty UNH campus to Engineering for a brief reception. Then back to the campsite for more partying, BBQ, campfire and family time, along with Jordan’s mother, Debra.
The next morning, Karen made breakfast for us all and we all headed out. Just before we pull the slide in, we always do a through cleaning of the RV. We noticed a small pile of metal shavings near the repair site. There had also been shavings the first day of our trip but we assumed that was due to poor cleanup on the part of the repair folks. Now that it has happened again, we cannot discount the idea that some part is getting destroyed each time we use the slide. Since it is Sunday, we cannot call the RV service department. After much discussion, we decide that our best option is to retrace our path (the quickest way back to the dealer with Thousand Islands accessible en route) rather than taking the alternative route (the quickest way to Thousand Islands) and call the dealer in the morning.