Goodbye to Maine

July 21, 2007
Saint John, New Brunswick

OK, so I didn’t get around to posting any pictures last night. Sorry! I just ran out of runway. We did most of our departure preparation last night, so we were ready to hit the road this morning. The lobsters from the guy in the park were boiled in seawater and actually came out a little bit undercooked to my way of thinking. It’s so easy to overcook seafood that this was a nice change of pace, but I’d have liked mine done just a tad more. And, when they advertised two “huge” lobsters with sides for $39.95, they really shouldn’t have delivered 1½ pounders to people who know better. All in all, though, it worked out well enough since we didn’t have to cook and cleanup was as simple as a walk to the dumpster. We finally had the bottle of dry rosé from Foley Vineyards in Lompoc that we’ve been carrying around, which was a nice starter.

It cleared up quite nicely last night and we sat outside until it was almost dark, with just enough light for the bugs to find us. We had a bottle of Sweet Cheeks Pinot Noir that I brought back from Oregon in March, which was a nice sipper. We finished off the evening with the rest of the grappa, so we were almost under the limit for the border crossing.

We were a little surprised to find this morning to be gray and damp, but so be it. We had “Merlin, the canine alarm clock” wake us up just before our scheduled time of 7:30, so we were up and ready to roll by 9:00. We stopped at the office to leave a forwarding address for our mail that hadn’t arrived. I’m a little worried about that, since it was sent Priority Mail from Texas on Tuesday and should have arrived on Friday. We certainly weren’t going to hang around and wait for today’s mail, so I asked them to forward it to CT, where we’ll stop on the way to Alabama. I’ll have to check with them on Monday, just to make sure.

Our route today took us north on ME-3 to US-1A, then ME-46 to ME-9, which we took generally east all the way to Calais. We topped off the diesel tank, and Geri whipped up the last of the burgers at a truck stop, and then we headed for the border. The US and Canadian checkpoints are at either end of a short (200’?) bridge that looks like something out of a spy movie (you know, where they exchange James Bond for some really goofy bad guy). The Canadian side had three lanes, and I felt comfortable with only two of them. Of course, it was the one with the wicked sharp turn that opened up for us, but I just sat there until one of the others became free. Even then, after passing through Customs, they made us pull over for inspection. We took up all of one whole lane coming out of the booth, so everyone had to drive around us while we were parked. The two nice inspectors spent about 15 minutes poking around in the coach before giving us a thumbs-up. They said, “The only thing we found was that your dogs are very spoiled. Have a good day”.

Two final reflections on Maine:

You know you’re in the boonies when the towns have no names. As we were driving up ME-9 between Bangor and Calais, we went through several places where the “town line” signs simply said “Twp 26” or “Twp 28” or the like. You’d think someone would have named the place by now, or maybe sold the naming rights (“Now entering Down East Septic Service”).

It must be nice here; they’re just dying to get in. I’ve never been in a place with more cemeteries than Down East Maine. I’ll acknowledge that we’ve done too much Interstate driving over the last couple of years, and that we’re fixing that. On the other hand, we must have been past 50 different cemeteries between Boothbay, Bar Harbor, and the trip up to Campobello Island. Most are relatively small (<200’ square) and some were downright tiny (like 2 headstones) and appear to be simple family plots (“Yeah, it’s a small family, so we just plant ‘em in the front yard over there by the old tractor”.) Many of the headstones are quite old, reminiscent of the old graveyard next to Trinity Church in NYC near where I used to work. It’s not something I look for, generally, but it was interesting enough to make note of the subtle difference in environment.