Thankfully, it was overcast today. I managed to keep my sunburn under control. We saw some really pretty geology mixed with some ugly people, seems like a typical mix here in vermont. Once again, (e:matthew) has tons of nice pics from the scenery.

I still have no cell service. If you have t-mobile don't think about moving to vermont till your contract is up. I will be home July 9th for anyone looking to get ahold of me.

--update I finally got some service in MA.


Along the way, we found wifi in Brattleboro, VT near this mailbox. I love finding wifi networks in random places.

Dummer and Dummerston We ended up at some little state park. The land was nice and it was only $14 for the four of us. They had showers but I couldn't shower because I was too burned from the sun yesterday.



The bad part was the rain. It rained last night and I had my only shoes outside the tent. They were out there because someone had used the bathroom and shat on the floor and as fate would have it, I stepped in it. So now I have wet, although clean shoes for the rest of the rainy trip. (E:matthew) 's only pants got soaked too and now he is wearing short and getting eaten alive my mosquitos.



The weather is still expecting rainstorms from now till the end of our trip. I hope something changes.

[size=m]Computer to bird communique [/size]



The birds here have learned to interface with the computer. (E:matthew) records them and then plays it with the laptop outside. The bird respond and eventually come check out the computer. It is very cyborgian. Who needs to learn the bird calls or buy wooden bird callers anymore. (E:matthew) has great pictures of this.

The last time I chimed in, we were in Brattleboro, VT.

(E:matthew) and I are so freakin sunburned from a skinny dipping mecca called the Ledges in VT , (e:terry) is not burned so bad



We had a great time jumping off the ledges. Some kid and his girlfriend climbed up to the top rock, the climbed 30 feet into the air up a tree, and then jumped from there. I lost those kind of guts at 23 I think. I was able to swing and jump from the lower two ledges.



There were lots of naked people, but just like every freakin' nudist treasure we have visited, everyone else naked at the place was 50+, but 80% of those people are 70+. I don't mean to sound ageist and if the old people and happy naked, more power to them, however, there comes a point were it just isn't even fun to watch people's old flab flop. I saw enough sagging and drooping for a lifetime.

I always wonder why there are no naked younger people, by young I mean 30 and younger. I can't imagine anyone has any reason to be shy around most of the people at these places and a lot of the places themselves are freakin' amazing.

It seems like in all the old books that dave has, there are plenty of young folk. Of course most of the info was from the 70s and most of those people are probably the same old people I saw today only saggier.

At least there were some people. A lot of the places we looked at were totally deserted, seemingly unused since they were written about in the guide book.

One place was converted from nudist to clothed but it was awesome anyways. It was a marble quary that they converted to a swimming hole. It was totally amazing, like a giant marble swimming pool, that could hold hundreds of people and went down about 70 feet. (Link to (e:matthews)'s journal with pics and web site)

When we were in Brattleboro, we checked the weather. To our dissapointment, we found that it is supposed to thunderstorm the rest of our trip from portland, ME to Norfolk, VA I so there is no escaping it.

Here are some pics of (e:matthew) applying sunburn aloe.

Little tidbits of information. I never want to be at the mercy of any little tibits of cross-generational, non-indexed, unsearchable text that might as well have been written on little scaps of paper and cast to sea in a bottle.

Weird place, it was an inertesting glimpse into country gay culture and definatly wasn't for me. Half is a nudist family area on a creek with some pools and the rest seems to be a sleezy outdoor bathhouse. We should have known when we saw the porn magazines strewn through the wood.

We talked to some guys named Al and Kevin drinking beer in the creek. The only thing I liked about him was that he guessed I was the youngest out of the three. He tried to get me to leave him my sock - said he had some foot fetish. He tried with (e:matthew) too. I told him that socks arn't free. He tried to impress us by telling us about his love for Cher. The whole thing was like a comedy skit.

Al told us that a very rich woman owned the estate the creek was on and left it to the state on condition they provided a nudist area and allowed gay people. The scary part is there is also some whacko who hunts gay people with a gun. They showed us all the bullets everywhere, some targets and two large trees he shot down. Apparently, he is some 300lb mountain man with long, greasy black hair and he hates that gay people go there. The whole thing was too much for me, it seemed not worth ever visiting again although the run in with Al and Kevin was an interesting glimpse into poor country gay culture and Cher is ironically a part of it.