Our cabin was cool rather than cold to wake up in and the views outside were overcast so nothing too ambitious made sense for the day. We ate breakfast, prepared a lamb casserole in the slow cooker we found, put together sandwiches and again donned our warmest gear before heading a little north to the Franconia Notch area where we'd identified a walk with no summit climbs and plenty of river stretches to provide interest in another tree-surrounded day. Our trail...

Back to Welsh's Restaurant for another hearty breakfast. Today we spotted a sign that amused us: "Unattended children will be given an espresso and a free puppy" - sounds a great idea and we thought perhaps we could claim four free puppies as our children are technically unattended by us! Then it was back on the road to North Woodstock where we were to meet up with our new swap hosts, Ken and Carol, for lunch at Cascade Coffeehouse. We had plenty of time to ma...

The best laid plans....... Today was our planned day for an epic hike up Mount Washington, the highest peak east of the Rockies. However the weather intervened and we decided high winds, low temperatures and low visibility meant the hike would not have been judicious - online the Mount Washington Observatory was predicting 65mph winds around the summit so there seemed little point in heading back to Pinkham Notch to be told the same! Given the weather and the 4...

We woke to a stormy, rainy morning: yesterday's rising winds obviously bringing in the change in the weather. We finished our packing and the little cleaning that was needed and made coffee to await contact from Don who had kindly offered to drive us to Bangor to pick up our hire car. This didn't look like an imposition as he did plan to go to Bangor later in the day to meet up with his daughter and go to the theatre but in the circumstances of not knowing Harley...

Today was our last full day in Castine and we had booked a day's kayaking with Karen who runs Castine Kayak Adventures. The weather was dull as we turned up at the wharf with plenty of warm layers to meet Karen. She was very reassuring and quizzed us about our health and experience so we were immediately confident we were in safe and experienced hands. We even practiced getting in and out of the kayak on dry land before getting onto the water at all. Well not qui...