Day 1 – Driving to the camp
Chapter 1,
The adventure begins. I’m on my way up, to our new, 120 acre, Camp on Patten Pond in Talmadge Maine. I’m excited, but it’s a combination of what have I done, and what have I gotten myself into with, I can’t wait to get up there to start to fix up this cabin on the lake and make it livable. The camp is off-grid completely. No electric. No plumbing. We have an outhouse. It’s very primitive. The cabin was built in 1964. Essentially it’s one room. There’s a little wall in there for a small sleeping area with two bunk beds. And then out in the main area there’s also another set of bunk beds and a cot. So technically the place could sleep seven, but it’s very small. It was advertised as 450 square feet. We will check on that when I get up there. I’m going up to meet our neighbor today because in order to access the property it has to be accessed by boat. So a rowboat came with the property, but it’s currently being housed on our neighbor’s property.
So to access the cabin you have to leave from the neighbor’s property and row over to the cabin. The cabin is on a peninsula that goes out into the lake, and it’s a peninsula but it’s essentially an island. It’s separated from what I’ll call the mainland by a bog, a marshy bog, so you can’t really get there from the mainland. You can’t get a vehicle too close to the cabin.
There are no roads that get you within eight-tenths of a mile of the cabin other than the road going into the neighbor’s property and up to the shoreline of the pond.
So my goal with this trip will be to get a tarp on the roof. The roof is failing and before we get any major leakage I wanted to get a tarp on the roof to get us through the winter. But the second order of business will be to see if I can find a way to get a vehicle closer to the cabin on our property. So I may get to play lumberjack and cut down a few trees to try to get my truck closer to the cabin. The truck is loaded up. I kind of look like the Beverly Hillbillies here with all this stuff. So today I’m scheduled to get up to the neighbor’s house probably a little after 1. So the rest of the day we’ll be trying to get all of this stuff that’s loaded up in my pickup truck and in the truck bed over to the cabin. And I think that if I can do that, that would be a significant accomplishment for today. I have a Starlink satellite internet system that I’m looking forward to getting set up. So that’ll also be one of the first things I do, probably tomorrow, to try to get that set up and get internet so that I can have connection to the outside world. I think I’m going to have one bar of coverage on cell phone signal, so I may be able to make calls, but having the internet would be a big improvement here. In order to get to the cabin, it’s about two miles of dirt roads, so it really is off-grid.