Uh, the middle class of Mass. family of 4, makes about $80k a year. That’s median family income. No way could they handle Martha’s unless it was for just a weekend visit. Philip is mildly rich. He should know what it takes for Martha’s little island. Although if he keeps buying planes and vacation homes, he ain’t gonna be rich much longer. (grin).

Fooey.. I didn’t want to read or respond, but this sounded fun:

“Those who are truly super-rich …have 10-acre estates … And their servants.. ”

Wealth is like ice cream; it comes in different flavors.

“It is the mildly rich who are clogging the place and annoying each other.”

ie: the middle class.
Nobody likes the middle class anymore… *sigh*

Mooshead is best visited in the winter because it is a “vaction spot” in the summer. That can be said for most of New England. Go South for the summer, like Arizona. Immerse in the lifestyle, to the extreme. Don’t fight the heat – soak it in and surround yourself with people who live with it… so darn friendly off-season! Sure beats the tourism face. Now that is what I call “cool”.

Moosehead Lake is a gorgeous place to spend a weekend or if you’re into the rural life as much as I am a week to a lifetime. It’s sort of the hub of everything out that way. Gorgeous. Ripogenous Dam (spelling error perhaps?) is just up the road about twenty minutes (In Maine we call that a short drive.) great fossil hunting there plus beautiful scenery and a really freaking huge dam. Plenty of hiking and mountain biking as well as whitewater rafting. If you’re going rafting I’d sugguest Unicorn Rafting Expeditions ( http://www.unicornraft.com ) for a real rough and tumble time.

Unemployed: Those who are truly super-rich don’t complain that Martha’s Vineyard is too crowded because they have 10-acre estates there with 1000 feet of private beach (you too can buy such a place if you have a spare $7 million). And their servants bring them food from the market so they don’t sit in traffic jams. It is the mildly rich who are clogging the place and annoying each other.

[And it is of course a shame that the working class are suffering right now. I do my best to help, e.g., suggesting that the government encourage the development of ubiquitous free (for a few packets) wireless Internet to revitalize the economy. But if you go back through this blog you'll see that the idea got a very bad reception. One thing that I learned during my 23 years working as a computer programmer is not to try to sell organizations solutions if they don't want them. So I'll probably have to wait 5 or 10 years before my skills would be considered relevant to any of society's problems. Meanwhile, of course, I'm supporting airplane mechanics and fuel truck drivers...]

Bill Gates needs to slow down! He’s doing the drive from Cambridge to Greenville at 55 miles an hour, even with Mass. and NH traffic and Maine backroads!

OK, I drive/meander with three young kids (motto: we stop just for the hell of it)and am partial to scenic routes, so I probably need to speed up while Bill slows down. As always, for most of your drivers the answer will lie between our two times.

Someone complained about Moosehead being too developed, and IMHO the Greenville area is getting there and if you’re traveling by car, you can find any number of equally quaint New England towns closer by, but Moosehead is very large and very diverse and if you just take the dirt road north of Rockwood a few miles you get pretty far away from things. Then a trip into the big town of Greenville becomes an adventure. For kids, the camps along the lake have a wonderful variety of things to do, and the view from little Mt. Kineo is spectacular. If you’re partial to true wilderness, though, you need to get a seaplane to drop you by one of the nearby lakes or at one of the outlying camps; Moosehead itself is not true wilderness.

But before you write off the Laurentians, head on up some time! (We’ll be in Tremblant in August).

I love how the super-rich can complain that “Martha’s Vinyard is too crowded” while most of the working class is either: unemployed, living at subsistance, or soon to be unemployed.

Poor Philip.

Another New England resort area with a decent airport is the northern White Mountains of New Hampshire. It’s about three hours from Boston by car. The airport is KHIE. Franconia, Twin Mountain and Jefferson all boast spectacular mountain scenery and lots of outdoor activities. Littleton is the commercial center. The only large lake in the area is Moore reservior, an impoundment on the Connecticut River which offers boating and fishing.

Jim

Thanks, Glenn. Baxter per se doesn’t appeal to me because you’re not allowed to bring dogs into the park. Newfoundland looks good in theory but my airplane-less friends would never be able to make it up there. And I wonder how many times one could cross that cold water and rocky coast in a single-engine piston airplane before one’s number came up…

Moosehead Lake strikes me as a bit too developed. Greenville is an interesting town in that it is not at all like the other rural towns in that part of Maine – much less of the paper mill/lumber town atmosphere. However, if I were to pick a place to go for the summer, I’d probably go to one of the towns near Baxter State Park – Patton or Millinocket (a paper town, so not the best place to live, but convenient to the south end of the park). Baxter is a true jewel. No where like it that I’ve been including the big parks out west; they do an excellent job of limiting the number of people who have access to the park. It can get crowded around Mt Katahdin, but it gets really empty away from there.

But, in the east, of all the places I’ve been, Newfoundland is the true jewel. A coast line beyond compare and desolate – more moose than people! Of course, it takes some effort to get there, but if you’re looking for a place where you can go and spend near the whole summer well removed from the mess that we’ve made of most of the US, you can hardly find a place better.

Ralph: You’re not supposed to tell anyone about Sauble Beach! That’s a Torontoian secret!

-Fellow TO’er