Tag Archives: oakfield

Saturday 29th August 2015 – I’M NOT DOING VERY WELL …

… trying to find a slide-in camper back for Strider, but I’m doing my best and having some dreadful luck.

Having had one of the best night’s sleeps for quite a long while I was up and about ready and eager to go at all of … errr … 05:30 this morning. It just goes to show you the benefit of an early night and a good bed.

Mind you, I might have been ready to go, but I doubt if anyone else would have been, and so I spent a good couple of hours catching up on stuff on the computer and on the internet and also made a list, in distance order, of places that I need to go to in order to find out about campers.

By 09:00 I was ready for the off and first stop was Oakfield for some fuel and breakfast. Strider’s fuel consumption has improved a little too, which is good news.

Breakfast, including coffee, came to $3:07 but seeing as I had no loose change, I offered $4:00. “I just love your accent!” said the woman on the checkouts, passing me back $1:00. “No need to load up your pockets with change”. It’s the first place that I’ve ever been to where the staff have tipped the customers.

The RV place at Medway told me more about this camper that they have on offer. It’s 1997, been sitting on a park site for God knows how long and they want $3,000 for it. And there are no accessories with it. We arranged an appointment for “after 16:00” to go to see it, but I shudder to think what it must be like.

I drove on down to Bangor as there were three places to visit there. One of them had nothing, and seemed quite uninterested about the situation (so much for US business techniques). The second one, Harveys RVs, still had listed in the inventory the one that I was originally offered, but which had been sold from underneath me. I reminded the salesman that it was still up there on the list, “but it’s sold” said the salesman. “But we have a couple of new ones you can look at”. Now I understand the sales technique. Quite simply, it seems to be to “get people onto the lot at any price”.

The third one, which I visited on spec, had something extremely interesting and we spent an hour or so going over it. And I would have driven away with it too but when we came to measure up, it was 3 inches too wide and about a foot too long. That was definitely a major disappointment to me. Mind you, they did have a brand-new one that would have fitted on a pick-up smaller than mine and which weighed about half of what any other would weigh, but it wasn’t a fold-down top and in any case $20,000 is much more than what I want to pay.

Still, we had a really good chat for ages, helped no doubt that I was the first person in North America to recognise the photos of his Pride And Joy and correctly identify it as a Mercedes 190 Ponton. This kind of thing helps to break the ice at parties.

Home Depot came up trumps yet again. I need a new Ryobi plus one circular saw (which would have cost me $69:00) but they had a starter kit of saw, basic drill, charger and lithium battery at just $79:00. And a pack of two lithium batteries came to just $49:00. Things are definitely looking up in North America from that point of view.

All the way back to Millinocket afterwards to find this camp site and I must have driven around every dirt track and mountain trail in the whole of Upper Maine but with no success as far as this camper went. This was something of a wasted journey and I was quite annoyed about that. The road was exciting though and didn’t ‘arf rattle my teeth, but I can see the benefit of decent all-weather tyres on a 4×4, instead of high-speed road tyres on a town car, when driving on dirt tracks.

highway maine usaSo I headed south on Highway 11 back to Bangor, on one of the nicest roads that I have ever driven. A new, refurbished black-top with scenic views, lakes, and lovely bends and you’ve no idea how much Strider loved the trip.

I had the speed limiter set to 55mph all the way down here and it really was an enjoyable drive, but Strider has a tendency to wander a little around the road, I’ve noticed. I’ll have to have a look at the dampers – maybe one or two need changing perhaps which is hardly surprising giving the battering he’s just had.

steel girder bridge brownville maine usaBrownville in Maine came up trumps, and for several reasons too – not the least of which being this gorgeous steel girder bridge across the river. It could do with a coat of paint of course, as well as all of the power lines that surround it pulled down so that I can have a decent shot of it, but I still think that it’s quite good nevertheless.

And where I had stopped to take the photo was on the corner of “Railroad Street” with an old sign directing me to the “railroad station”. What more can any man desire?

brownville junction railway maine usaThere’s quite an important railway junction here, with three lines merging in a triangular junction. I did notice a building that might have been a railway station but it was festooned with US flags and “Private Property” signs – clearly the home of Republicans, and so I wasn’t going to risk a bullet in the back of my neck by photographing it, such is the paranoia and the fear gripping most Americans these days.

But from the other side of the tracks, braving the “private property” and “no trespassing signs”, I could take a photo of the busy goods yard and tell you that the station is on the other side behind the railway wagons.

lumber pile pleasant river maine usaUpper Maine is noted for its lumber industry and there is ample evidence of that all over the place, especially here at Pleasant River where there is the biggest pile of timber that I have ever seen. It looks much more impressive in real life than it does on film.

In the foreground is the finished product – wood for the building industry all cut and planed, and shrink-wrapped to keep out the damp and for ease of shipping. All of this of course might explain the busy railway goods yard at Brownville Junction just up the road.

There were lots more things to see too but the light had gone by now and it was going dark. I’ll have to come back here another time.

But I had noticed that I hadn’t seen a single motel all along this road and so I headed for Bangor. And by the time that I arrived at Bangor in the pitch black, I still hadn’t either.

As for a motel, a cheap cat-house wanted $99:00 for a room so we can forget that, and so I headed to Dysart’s truck stop for tea. And much to my astonishment, Dysarts now has vegetarian and vegan options on the menu.

They also had nice, thick artisan-type blankets at $9:99 and if I’m going to end up sleeping some nights in Strider, there’s no time like the present to make a start. It beats $99:00 in a cheap motel.

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Saturday 4th October 2014 – A LONG DAY

We wawoke with the dawn all stiff and cold, with the weathe rhaving broken and it was now pouring down with rain. But, quite surprisingly, we hadn’t felt a thing through the night and slept the sleep of the dead.

The cafe place was however open and so we went for breakfast, the whole point of sleeping on the car park. And the cafe did us proud too for which we were both grateful.

A 5-minute drive from there took us to Weare, New Hampshire, and this was where the engine needed to be. We arrived just as they were opening up at 08:00, which was what we had intended. Half an hour saw the engine off the back of the truck and another half an hour saw it stripped right down (it’s nice to watch professionals work and the key to all of this is that they have their workshop spotlessly cleean and all of their tools right to hand and isn’t that a lesson to me?)

It turns out that a big-end shell had seized onto the crankshaft and in a high-performance racing engine at 8600 rpm, a broken con rod was inevitable. The broken rod had thrown itself around the lower part of the block and the sump and damaged just about everything that there was to damage.

While Darren was paying his respects to the engine, I was taken out for a walk by the owner’s father. he has a collection of vehicles from the early 1950s and he spent a delightful hour or so showing me around his vehicles. I really was in my element there and I was having a really good time, even if Darren wasn’t.

We stopped back at the cafe for lunch on our way back and then in the driving rain headed for home. A stop for tea at Dysarts just outside Bangor and then another refuelling at Oakfield. A relatively-painless crossing of the border saw us back here at 22:00 (don’t forget there’s a time difference of an hour between Eastern Time and Maritime Time) and that’s one more project accomplished before I leave.

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Friday 3rd October 2014 – WE WENT TO NEW HAMPSHIRE THIS AFTERNOON

Darren had to go down there this afternoon after work to take the engine of his pulling truck back to the makers so that they could have a look at it.

However, he had suffered a slight welding flash last night and that makes driving uncomfortable in the sunlight, especially as there’s a 200-mile stretch between Houlton and Portland in Maine where the road is full south-east and the bright setting sun is in your face for the entire distance. Consequently, a second driver was required for that leg, and I was the only one not doing anything.

I’d had a bad night too, so I ran a few errands here and there, and then crashed out in a layby for an hour or so. I may as well use the free time profitably.

We were held up at the border by the US Border Patrol, as anyone reading these notes might have prophesied. Apparently the engine is classed as “commercial goods” as “it can be used to generate income”, hence an import tax was required. What income it could generate with two con-rods sticking through the sump became a matter of quite some considerable discussion.

Apparently anglers who cross the border with fishing rods, and golfers with golf clubs, and anyone with a car or van might now be liable to a US import tax now – all these items are capable of generating income. And what about a man who crosses the border with a woman? There is an enormous number of street corners in the USA after all and so the income-generating potential is enormous.

But the USA customs officials were intransigent and that was that. But whatever is going on in the USA? It’s almost as if they don’t want people to come to their country to spend … gulp … a good deal of money … … in their country.

We fuelled up at Oakfield and then I took the wheel for the 200-mile dash down the highway. A big Chevy C5500 with a V8 6.6-litre Duramax diesel engine. It’s the biggest thing that I’ve driven since I had a tour bus, and all the way through the rush hours of Bangor, Augusta and Portland too. And I managed it without hitting anything and killing anyone too.

Once it was dark, Darren retook the wheel and we drove a little further on to a shopping mall just off the highway where he met a few of his friends for a chat, and then we continued on along the old highways, passing many of the places that I drove through on my way here, right into the depths of darkest New Hampshire. We stopped in the car park of a small cafe-restaurant place, Darren on the front seats and me in the back, and I went out like a light and that was that.

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