July 8-10

On Friday the 8th we moved to Seven Maples Campground, a nice little park, nothing special. We are finding Vermont Parks to be similar to other parks in New England. Firstly the State Parks have no electability, and are extremely tight, even for us with our short trailer. It's just not worth it for us. That leaves us with the relatively few private parks, which are more expensive, & also generally tight for even our rig. While the park we just left was nice enough, the road to the dumping station was so tight we decided not to dump until this park. Don't get me wrong the parks we have found so far are fine, just much different than the midwest.

On our last day in So. NH, we went to the Hillsboro balloon fest. This festival has been held for the past 23 years, and was once MUCH bigger with 5X the current 10 hot air balloons. Unfortunately we didn’t see any balloons go off. The wind was just too stiff. Here is the basket to the Irish Rover. They were able to launch the three morning launches, but those take place at 6:00AM. We are on vacation, so we missed those. They did have skydivers who gave a great show, and because this is a very small festival we got up close.Hillsboro is in the White mountains, so not only is flying a challenge, but you can imagine that skydiving isn’t easy either. They really have to thread a needle to come down through the "notches". The skydiver here, is a member of the Army, has done countless jumps, and is an instructor for the company doing the demo. As he packed his chute he described the process to us. It was very interesting, and he was an excellent teacher.

This fest is held combined with the Hillsboro Fire Co. muster. We didn't stay for it, but we did eat at thier trailer, and bought some raffle tickets for a Weber grill with their Fire company decal on the front, very cool.