START: Carr Point Recreation Area, Portsmouth, RI
END: West Thompson Lake Campground, CT
Miles traveled:
Travel time: 1030-1230
Neither Michael nor I slept well last night. For me it was the noise of the fan he likes to have on because he gets too hot. I HATE noise at night, to include white noise. Makes it hard for me to fall asleep. He wasn’t able to sleep well after several hours because he had a headache. He got up for a while then went back to bed. When he got up and wasn’t coming back, I was able to turn the fan off and get some sleep.
I did a workout at the campsite instead of going for a run, since there is nowhere to run here (except maybe along the main road which is rather busy in the morning with Navy personnel coming in to work). It was super nice out - breezy and cool and warm at the same time - cool in the shade, warm in the sun. The family spent most of the early morning sitting at the picnic table outside, enjoying the nice weather and hearing the waves hit the shore.
We made Ruby do a page of her writing book. She needs the most work in this area. She is very resistant to learning how to write letters properly. She has told me that she wants to write and spell her own way. That’s nice Ruby, but if everyone just did it their own way, it would be very hard to understand each other. I might spell something one way, you another. You might draw a letter in a way that makes sense to you but not to me. Mass confusion would result! And this, people, is why things like grammar and spelling and punctuation are important! And I will never buy the argument of “well, you know what I mean” to explain poor spelling/grammar. No, no I do NOT magically “know” what you mean when you misspell something. Sometimes I might get it, but many times I do not. Just stop being lazy and learn to spell, people!
Okay, sorry - I get a little passionate about that sometimes. By the way, don’t text me a string of non-punctuated thoughts loaded with abbreviations. I won’t read it. I’ll ask you to re-send in English.
The campground we’re staying at tonight is an Army Corps of Engineers campground. We arrived early (check-in time is supposed to be 1400) but they let us in. Our site was tricky - it was sloped (downhill) it was angled (the spot was at a curve in the campground loop) and it was uneven - took us a long time to level the rig, even though it has an auto-level feature. It kept giving us errors and saying “out of stroke.” In the end, the right rear was so elevate that the tires were off the ground, but only on that side. They were still grounded on the left.
We had some lunch then headed out for Springfield Armory Historical Park. The armory was a factory for making rifles, dating back to just after the revolutionary war. Not a large place, but definitely worth a visit if you ever around Springfield, Massachusetts. One of the most interesting things I learned about was the Blanchard lathe. It was made to create the stock for a rifle, and do so in a MUCH faster time than by hand. It took 14 hours to create one by hand. After the invention of this machine, 14 could be made in a hour. Nice improvement in efficiency!
Speaking of Massachusetts (again), gotta say - they really love their strange, difficult-to-navigate intersections here. Many places have traffic circles, which make more sense, but there are intersections with 5-7 roads all coming together, and many of them do not have any traffic lights. It’s this strange mash up of stop signs and yield signs and triangles just before the actual intersection. The roads make triangles so that if you’re approaching the intersection and wanted to turn left, you first turn right (onto one leg of the triangle) so that you can turn left (on another leg of the triangle) and then make your left turn from there. That was probably very confusing, and if I had a whiteboard I’d draw you a picture and you’d understand it better, but, point it, they seem to love their strange/intersections here!
Observation regarding the state of NY: it is the land of signs. There seemed to be signs for unnecessary things, and a noticeable lack of signs when you need on. For example, there would be a sign saying “End Speed Limit 35” but no sign telling you what the speed limit now is.
