5-16-06 (Tuesday): It rained all day again today. There’s extensive flooding all over New England. We’re staying one more night at the campground near Mystic. We’ve chosen a route to Cape Cod that looks like it will avoid the problem areas. We leave tomorrow morning, and should be at the western edge of the Cape by early afternoon. We’ll stay there for a couple of days and then head for Maine. We’d like to arrive in Maine no later than the 27^th. That will give us a week to explore the area around our home for the summer.

We had a great day today. We went to the Pemaquid Indian reservation museum. It was absolutely outstanding. I’d say it was at least equal to any of the Smithsonian museums I’ve ever been to. The attention to detail was amazing. There were lots of videos and dioramas, but my favorite was a village reconstruction that you walked through. There was an audio device that you carried with you that gave detailed information about eaach part of the scene. Everything was so realistic—the stream was real water, the figurines had dirty feet, the people all looked different. I highly recommend this museum for anyone who has any interest at all in Native Americans. There’s also a casino on the reservation, but we weren’t interested in gambling, so we skipped that.

We are finally seeing a little blue sky (6:30 pm) now, and the newscasters are saying most of the floodwaters are starting to go down. It’s going to take several days, at least, before the waters recede enough to estimate what the damages were. Apparently there’s been some damage to the superstructures of bridges and dams. I’m nervous about leaving tomorrow, but we really have to get on the road. We’re making the stop in Capae Cod partly to give the waters in Maine time to recede and partly because Wiley has always wanted to see the lighthouses there. We haven’t heard any reports of flooding there, so we’re hoping it’ll be okay.