My
Memories of the Hermit Island, Maine Vacation
I
remember that we planned the vacation for a long time.
It was to be our first camping vacation.
I am not sure of the date, but it had to be after 1954 when we moved to
Stow. We bought a new “umbrella tent” for this vacation.
The tent was unique in that it had no center pole.
Dad had us practice setting the tent up in the back yard at Sanford
Avenue. I think we had it down to
less than ten minutes, which really came in handy our first night.
We
drove (all of us in the car, there were no vans in those days) all day and all
night to get to Maine. It was close
to 4:00 AM the next morning when we approached Hermit Island.
I think everyone was asleep except Dad, the driver of course, Mom and me.
It was very foggy and Mom was nervous because we could see water close to
both sides of the road. Mom thought
maybe we were lost when we spotted a light through the fog.
Dad aimed the car toward it and we found out it was the office for our
campground. Since it was so late,
they told us to pitch the tent anywhere and we could move it in daylight.
This
was where practice made perfect. We
set up the tent to the car headlights and moved in for the rest of the night.
We were awakened by the smell of the outhouse, right next to where we had
set up our tent. Dad and the boys scoped out the campground and found us a
secluded site, among the dunes right on the beach. It was a beautiful spot, isolated from the other sites.
It was like our private beach.
Sleeping
in the tent was an experience. Mom
had an army cot to sleep on, the rest of us were in sleeping bags on air
mattresses. The only problem with
the dune site was that it wasn’t level. All
night, the guy at the top of the row would roll downward and the rest of us
bunched up at the bottom. We would
then get up and move back up. Not a
good night’s sleep by any stretch of the imagination!
Even
though this was August, the water was very cold. If you waded in, you got pain from your toes to your knees.
We
spent several days on Hermit Island. I
remember going into town one night to eat out at a drive in restaurant.
It was the kind where the girl comes to your car for the order and places
the food on a tray hung from your car window.
Like Swenson’s still is today. Dad
ordered a milk shake and the girl delivered it right to his lap.
He wore milk shake back to camp that night!
One
afternoon Mike and I (can’t remember if Denny was with us) rented a rowboat on
the inland bay. Unfortunately, we
did not know it was affected by the tide, which went out leaving us stranded in
the boat, sitting on mud, far from shore. We
proceeded to try to move the boat by digging the paddles into the mud and
walking toward the back of the boat. This
worked but it was a very slow, long process.
It took us hours to get to shore.
(Mike
can’t remember anything else now but wanted to get this much to you.)