I'm still quite young (as all of you are) and every summer i think "this has got to be the best summer ever". But after learning so much this year, and getting closer with my family, i have to say this one was pretty special. We all went to Madawaska, this is a little camping area infested town right before Algonquin Park in Ontario. The camp site was right on the lake and it was really peaceful. ON one side of the road there was the camp sites and on the other side a little swimming area, beach, diving board , etc. But if you swam out a ways there was a pretty large bridge, used only for dirt bikes, which most residents dove off of. My brother and i , being the brave ones we are, climbed to the twenty foot top and jumped off. RUSH!! the first ten times is the hardest, then your arms are so numb, it doesn't hurt. Another really cool thing we did was rent a canoe and explore to find a really beautiful waterfall , about three miles from our site. My sister, brother and i , climbed up it (being supervised) and sat in little pools on top. The water was suprisingly warm. Funny enough, the water of that Lake gets emptied half way, and then next spring gets filled back up with fresh water from the dam, so its always clean. To make a long story short!! =) what are some of your favorite places for vacations or good memories with family trips?

-- jillian (sweetunes483@yahoo.com), October 22, 2001

Answers

HA! When I was in college a bunch of us went to Madawaska,& Presque Isle, Maine every Summer..loved to feel like big shots zipping across to Canada on the bridge to buy our filthy cigarettes and flirt with the Canadian guys..ah those were the days....I try to forget about the atomic-sized mosquitoes, and then there was that night that a moose mistook our VW Bug for a threatening thing...imagine a full- sized moose challenging a VW Bug on a dark road in the middle of nowhere! We had been told by the girls who were from Maine to "just turn off the engine and the headlights and it will go away.".......well, without being too graphic, I can tell you that those things did not work that night much to our horror..A few hours later when they towed the moose carcass away on a flatbed and I learned how to drive at night without a windshield (just keep your mouth closed), we ended up that evening swimming au natural in a gorgeous lake..since it was just we girls and it was extremely dark we thought it would be ok......Those Summers in Northern Maine were the absolute best!

-- lesley (martchas@bellsouth.net), October 22, 2001.

I remember one summer at my Uncle Joe's cabin in the mountains of central PA. Electricity, but no indoor plumbing. A shack out back and a mountain creek. We rebuilt the dam to make the swimming hole deeper. We took hikes in the woods. We cooked out over a fire. The cabin was an old, real log cabin, an original settlers cabin that had been kept up. We slept in bunks. My mom told me just a few months ago that, although there were relatives living nearby, she was not going to exhaust all of us by going here and there that summer. She said if anybody wanted to see us, they knew where we were. I remember a fun, relaxing time when we had our dad, who was our favourite playmate, all to ourselves for four glorious weeks.

-- Cathy N. (keeper8@attcanada.ca), October 22, 2001.