OUR LAST DAY HERE (THIS TRIP).
Day 39 – It was very humid & 66 degrees this morning. Fully cloudy. This our last day here. It’s been a wonderful ten days. Tomorrow we leave for Vermont. One thing I forgot to mention, and it’s not happy news: we found out why we haven’t seen any moose here this trip and why we only saw a couple of them in 2018. We saw a NH State policeman at Subway the other day and he was very talkative. We asked him where all the moose were, and he said that the ticks have really put a damper on the population, and that if you do happen to see one, it will probably be emaciated, and you’ll see places where it is bare, having lost chunks of fur. (In NY there’s been a “Deer Wasting Disease” talked about in the past couple of years. Maybe ticks are also causing that problem?) Bummer!
After lunch we went out to the tent and spent the afternoon there. It was supposed to be 89 degrees here today and fully cloudy. Instead the high was 78 degrees with partial clouding and a good breeze. Humid though, the tent was cooler than inside the RV. By 11 a.m. only four campsites were filled. It was Sunday, one would think it would still be crowded since it’s part of the weekend. Look out come 4th of July!
Rob packed up the tent, a bit of packing up before leaving tomorrow morning. We showered, and I put together dinner. Even though we were here 10 nights, we decided we could stay longer. We’ll definitely be back again.
We’ve had many adventures in this area. We first stayed at this park 25 to 30 years ago when we were still tent camping. At that time it was mostly just a grassy field with picnic tables and fire rings. It was late fall and it was quite cold. We remember taking walks to the Pond to take pictures; we didn’t have kayaks yet. Back then, particularly in the fall, moose were everywhere. There were blinds in several places along Route 26 where you could observe the moose without disturbing them because they didn’t see you. We went back to the area several more times to go moose-watching, and we stayed in a small motel in Errol. We had a canoe then and we would paddle on the Androscoggin River out to Lake Umbagog. We saw many Bald Eagles, Loons, and Moose. We also were in the area with the RV and the kayaks on three occasions, and had two memorable adventures. One time we were paddling on the Androscoggin River in the kayaks and ahead of us were a mother loon and a baby loon. We didn’t want to scare them or disturb them so we stopped paddling. The mother and baby separated when they saw us coming and we ended up floating between them. The baby squeaked a couple of times and the mother starting muttering, not yelling or quacking, basically talking to the baby in a calm manner. The baby calmed down, we floated by, and after we’d passed them, they reunited behind us, baby cuddling up to mom. The other adventure – we were camping at Lake Umbagog State Park right on the Lake. This is a very large lake and the wind can pick up without warning, so we didn’t want to kayak from the campground. What we did, however, was rent a small motor boat, we thought it would be safer in case it got windy. We went way out in the lake where there were some bald eagle nests. All was going well. Hours later we were returning to the campground, and the wind picked up, big-time. Very large waves rocked the little boat; we could barely control it, and we nearly capsized several times. Scary. We made it back to shore, but later the rangers had to go out and rescue some kayakers who had capsized. Luckily no one was hurt. We prefer calmer waters.
For more detailed information about Coleman State Park, click here.