9/13 Massachusetts again

 We had just enjoyed a beautiful evening in our dispersed campsite in the forest in Vermont.  But the trouble started the next morning, when it started to rain.  The dirt road had already been a bit muddy, and we couldn't easily avoid the muddy patches because we were hemmed in by the trees and river.  Lying in bed listening to the rain, I started getting extremely nervous about the mud.  By 7:00, I was outside trying to figure out how we were going to get out, and soon after that Emily and I decided to have the kids eat in the car while we tried to leave before the mud got worse.  It turned out that we were already too late, though.  We got the trailer up to the road, but the SUV slipped in the mud on the edge of the road into the trees and we couldn't get it out.  We wanted to call a tow truck, but for some reason Emily's cell phone company kept giving weird messages saying that her plan had expired!  She could still text, but she couldn't make calls, and she had almost no service at our camping location, anyway.  So she kept having to walk down the road to text family members for help.

Long story short, we spent the morning waiting for a tow truck, but by 1:00 we were back on the road and on our way to our next stop, the flagship Yankee Candle Store in Massachusetts.  It's a very large and interesting (and expensive) store!  The kids made custom jar candles, and they had a Christmas area where it "snowed" every four minutes.  You would think the kids had never seen real snow before, they were so excited!  They had a little Harry Potter themed area where most of us got sorted into houses by Sorting Hats that they were selling (Sierra thought the hat was too scary), they had a Santa's Workshop where the kids wrote letters to Santa, and they had a Ben and Jerry's ice cream counter that we bypassed after having been to the factory the day before.  They were nice enough to let us unhitch and leave the RV there while we went to buy gas and McDonald's.  Then we hitched back up and headed back to Connecticut, where we were happy to be back to our comfy beds and air conditioning and hot showers!

In front of the Yankee Candle store.

The kids enjoying the "snow."  (Look closely and you can see the falling white streaks in the upper portion of the picture.)

Making custom candles at the Yankee Candle shop.  (It kind of looks like Summer is eating her candle, but she's smelling one of the scent options.)