Hey, it's not raining!

July 12, 2007
Boothbay, ME

Well, a front must have gone through overnight, because the weather is certainly better, at least for today. It’s hard to call it a cold or a warm front, though, since temperatures haven’t changed much. Today’s high might have been in the mid-70s, with a breeze off the ocean keeping things cool. As I sit here outside composing this post at 6:30 PM, it’s down to 71°F and dropping. At least it was fairly sunny today, after the morning gloom burned off.

I had thought about making a road trip today or tomorrow, driving inland around Sebago Lake, cutting west into New Hampshire to the Conway area, and then up to Mount Washington. It looks doable on the map but when I routed it out it was over 3 hours driving time. I decided to hold off for now, since we’re only here until Saturday AM and I’m not sure I want to commit an extended day for a side trip.

This morning, we finally got down to making some reservations for the Maritimes. We’ll stay a week each in St. John, New Brunswick, Halifax and Sydney, Nova Scotia, and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (4 weeks total). We may change things around a bit, as one of the places booked doesn’t have the preferred electrical connection available. This won’t be a huge issue as long as we don’t need air conditioning, as a 20 amp circuit can keep the batteries charged up and run the coffeemaker and TV. Worst case, we could probably run the generator, although most campgrounds frown on that. I’ll call a couple of times over the next two weeks to see if we can get upgraded if there’s a cancellation.

This afternoon we spent several hours exploring “downtown” Boothbay Harbor. It’s really a pretty small touristy area about 5-6 blocks long, with a few waterside eateries, a bunch of B&Bs and small hotels (many with themes; one is built to look like a tugboat), and several tour boat docks. Some of the boats are selling whale watching cruises, but it strikes me that this isn’t really the right time of year for that so a bunch of tourists are probably getting “skunked”.

We started with lunch and a brew, naturally. We ate at one of the waterside restaurants (“Gray’s Wharf”), sitting on the outside patio. It was quite nice, sunny and an appropriate breeze (refreshing but not chilling the food). Geri had a seafood sampler and I had a lobster roll. I’m thinking that I need to use this time to do the lobster roll survey and see if Red’s in Wiscasset is still the champ. Last year (or was it the year before?), we tested Elaine’s outside Newport, RI (good, but not Red’s). Today’s verdict: good lobster, well-picked and dressed oh-so-lightly with mayo (as opposed to Red’s which comes “naked” with butter or mayo on the side), slightly cheaper ($14 v. $16), and definitely a lot lighter on the meat (Red’s was falling off the roll on all sides). Advantage: Red’s.

After eating, I moved the car (2 hour parking limit) to a small lot by the water and we continued our walking tour. Geri picked up a couple of souvenirs (“It’s 5:00 Somewhere” twirlie things for us, Pat & Al, Melisa, and the Bowers), and we bought a neon “Bar” sign for the coach for when we entertain. I’m not sure how much use it’ll get but it should be fun when we’re at rallies and the like.

We took a drive later in the afternoon, through East Boothbay to a place called Ocean Point, where you can see a couple of islands, 2 lighthouses, and many boats and lobster trap buoys in the coves. It wasn’t really late enough in the day for good photo light, but I snapped a few anyway.

Before we started out today, I repacked my 35mm bag into the new backpack I got a few weeks ago. I’ve got some work to do because I expected more to fit in the backpack; I just need to find everything’s “place”, I suppose. I believe I’ll be keeping the shoulder bags as a complement to the backpack since, if I had to guess, the old bags will be easier to manage when we’re touring by car and making scenic stops along the way while the backpack will definitely be best when hiking any distance to a photo opportunity is involved. On the other hand, moving everything back and forth between two bags doesn’t seem like something I’m likely to do on a regular basis. We’ll have to see how this one works out…

In any event, here’s a link to a few shots from today’s batch:

http://picasaweb.google.com/GeorgeandGeri/AlbumBoothbay