Daily Archives: October 4, 2012

How can I convey THIS…? ahh…ahhhh: The smell here

Posted on October 4, 2012 | 5 comments

If I could project or download THIS place you’d share the bliss.  Day after day I am caressed by the floaty-light smell of Balsam Pine.  Or is it Hemlock, or maybe Tamarind.

I don’t know, but PineSol or one of those “Little trees” car deodorizers can’t touch it.   Amazing to me is that is wafts over me repeatedly; it’s new every time, a hundred or thousand times a day.  With sound, your senses will accommodate, set a new threshold and “not hear” baseline sounds.  Like acclimating to traffic or background noise.  At home even smelly smells get less bad, like paint or something.  you get used to it and don’t notice anymore.

Thank Goodness these smells keep overwhelming me.  There is no picture I can share.  No scratch and sniff nor smell-o-rama from John Waters to download.  I can only oogle,  awh,  and gush about how great it is.  WOW.  Even all capital letters cant express.  Seems every turn or crest of a hill brings a warm or even a cool breeze to celebrate.  Just when I forget how nice it smells….boom, there it is again.

WOW, It smells SO GOOD !!!

– David

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DAY 20 – 10/4/2012 somewhere in the Maine Woods, in which we see a moose!

Posted on October 4, 2012 | 3 comments

Impossibly tall, with an appearance at once majestic and goofy, we rounded a corner and saw a Moose! On bikes on the logging road, we were about 40 yards away. We knew he was a boy – he had a beautiful rack of antlers. Agog, we could barely get the camera out for a few photos as he stalked away into the trees. We’ve never been in close proximity to a moose before – just distant glimpses in Wyoming.

We had set up camp on a wooded rise at the confluence of Machias River and the West Branch of the Machias. This night, we were in an actual campsite. It was about 5 miles into the woods on the dirt logging road. But the campsite was completely deserted at this time of year except for us and the birds and chipmunks. After our moose bike ride, we put the kayak in the Machias at our camp.

I used to do sprint-distance triathlons. Doing two out of the three sports in a training session was called a ‘brick’. So, on this day in the beautiful wilds of Maine, our brick was a bike ride and paddle.

Gratitude was the overriding emotion of the day for me. I am grateful that, after the cancer ordeal, here I am, in this beautiful place far from civilization. I’m also so grateful for my wonderful husband, who really made this possible. We’re just ordinary middle-class people. Yet we were able to stop working for awhile and go off into the woods. Absolutely priceless!

We don’t shoot the rapids. We only paddle up to take the picture of the rapids!

– Jane

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Posted in DAY posts, Mountain biking, Wildlife

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