Bezabor: posting from Rangeley, Maine
Bezabor: (posted from the library in Rangely, Maine)
(this portion written offline in the Wal-Mart parking lot at Waterville, Maine) Since we were in the Freeport area, we stayed Tuesday night (the 13th) in the municipal parking lot at Freeport… within two blocks or so of LL Bean….with four or five of the big RVs. To some degree that was a mistake. One guy ran his generator until almost midnight so I didn’t get any sleep until early morning but then just slept in a little and I was fine. Labashi didn’t seem to mind the generator noise. Lesson learned--- don’t assume the RV guys are going to shut down their generators at 9 pm like they do when forced to shutdown by such policies in most campgrounds.
While reading a local newspaper, I read about a trail in Harpswell called the Cliff Trail. It features two ‘Fairy-House Building Zones’. A sign at the beginning of the trail tells how it works: you build ‘fairy houses’ out of any dead natural materials, sticks, bark, leaves, stones, etc in either of the two areas designated for this purpose. The houses are limited to a foot square of footprint and a cubic foot of volume, “about the size of a milk crate”, the sign says. If I understood correctly, this was a tradition started on Monhegan Island.
Since Wednesday morning (9/14) was foggy anyway, we thought we’d take a walk on the Cliff Trail and check out some fairy houses! It was a lot of fun and we even joined in by building three of them ourselves. The woods was well suited to the task--- lots of evergreens and birches so the groundcover of needles and lots of deadfall had us imagining we were seeing fairy houses long before we ever reached the building zone for them. Birch bark was available in pieces up to a foot square so that made it pretty easy to come up with a roof. Labashi collected some acorns and pine cones to decorate hers while I searched around for mossy overhangs to close in. We declared ourselves master fairy-house builders in short order.
The article said we should plan about an hour for the one-and-one-half mile trail but it took us almost three hours. We had great fun both looking at the fairy-houses others had built and building our own. The trail was a good one, too. It was mostly pine-needle covered and wound through mixed woods then led us up a steep hill, the other side of which was a cliff overlooking a small bay. We eased along the cliff trail, hoping to see some wildlife and happened upon a big pileated woodpecker—he must have been nearly a foot high. We heard him pecking very slowly and could see pieces of bark falling from a tree in the distance. As we closed in, I had the camera ready but he was too smart for us…no matter how slowly and carefully we advanced, he would only let us get so close then would fly further along the cliff top and we’d start the game again.
After Cliff Trail, we headed for Orr’s Island. I was hoping the kayak shop there would be open but mostly just wanted to get a look at the water. But that was not to be. The fog got thicker as we approached the sea (of course!) and before long we couldn’t see over the water at all. So we decided to take in the Maine Maritime Museum at nearby Bath for the afternoon.
The Maine Maritime Museum was very good. We particularly enjoyed the old buildings and old shipbuilding equipment of the ‘yard. Just the scale of the tools is impressive… I saw a wrench--- just a standard open-ended wrench design--- but as long as I am tall. The part that’s missing from any museum like this is the smells. I’d love to have seen this shipyard as it was building the Wyoming… the wood smells of the sawmill and carpentry shops, the smoky smells of the blacksmith shop, the pine-pitch and tarry smells of the caulking shed, and the pigment and paint-thinner smells of the paint shop would have been fantastic!
We left the museum at closing time and the fog appeared to be clearing so we thought we’d get a look at the ocean again by going down toward Phippsburg and Fort Popham. It wasn’t long, though, until fog closed us in again. We did make it to Fort Popham and as we sat snacking in the van, a sea kayaker came walking up from behind the fort in full gear. I went over and asked him what brand of radar he was using (that’s a joke, of course) and he said the fog was so thick that even with his GPS and compass and thorough knowledge of the area he and his paddling pals had gotten a little lost and into some rougher waters. He had decided to call it a day but his friends were paddling on. I helped him bring his kayak in from the beach and load it on his car rack. While chatting he gave me some recommendations for good paddling spots up at Mount Desert Island and I believe he was gently trying to dissuade me from attempting to paddle the mouth of the Kennebec by talking about how long he had paddled in Maine before attempting it. No worries there, mate! This would be the kind of place to aspire to paddling as you work on your kayaking and navigation skills. I’d think we could do it at slack tide but would not want to be out there in the fastest hours of tide change.
We then drove on to Wiscasset to find a parking spot for the night. I had read about being allowed to overnight in a municipal parking lot off Water Street so we went searching and it didn’t take long. As you might expect, Water Street runs along the water, in this case the Sheepscot River. I noticed a restaurant nearby called ‘Le Garage’ and looked it up in a good guidebook we picked up – ‘An Explorer’s Guide – Maine’ and it was rated as exceptional. The listing drew me in with their ‘light meals’ policy--- you could get smaller portions for under $10 for most entrees--- and a description of a Maine specialty ‘finnan haddie’. I took a chance on it for my meal from the description and learned that finnan haddie is smoked cod and hard-boiled egg cooked, diced and then folded into a white sauce and served over toast. I loved it and can’t wait to try it again somewhere else. Labashi had a very good lime-shrimp with salsa and avocado appetizer.
We then walked through the darkened streets of Wiscasset and had the eerie experience of passing a graveyard (dated 1735) in a very dark area of town just as an overhead streetlight went out. After we passed, the light came back to life. It couldn’t have been timed any better if one of the graveyard residents was playing a little game with the two tourists out after dark.
It rained fairly hard on our little home there in the Wiscasset parking lot overnight. This was supposedly the remnants of Ophelia but it wasn’t windy, just some steady rain. Since the day was supposed to be threatening rain all day and we could see the coast was foggy, we headed for Augusta and the Maine State Museum. It’s rated a ‘gem’ by AAA and as under-appreciated by the Explorer book and they are right (and only $2 per person!). AAA recommended a mimimum of an hour but we again spent more than three hours. I loved little things like the display of a granite quarry derrick. The derrick is of course much to high to fit in the room’s 15-or-so-foot ceiling so at first all you see is the rotating platform of the derrick mast and a short section of the mast and boom as they go up through the ceiling. But as you follow them up to the ceiling, you notice a large block of granite suspended from the ceiling --- just where it would be if the derrick were a real one--- and it’s suspended over the walkway you just came through as you approached the derrick display. Very cool!
We then rushed off to Colby College in Waterville to see their art museum since it was getting a little late in the day. The galleries were filled with interesting paintings. My favorite of the day was a Winslow Homer painting called ‘The Trapper’ and Labashi liked the James McNeill Whistler dry-point drawings and Walter Gay oil paintings. All and all a fine museum, particularly for a small college.
We had a magnificent supper at Wendy’s and rented a DVD for the evening to watch at Parc Wal-Mart.
The ‘Winged Migrations’ DVD worked out very well for us. The movie is excellent in itself but it also allowed me to test out the current draw of my DVD player in my laptop via the inverter I had plugged in to the van’s cigarette lighter. I was a little concerned that the laptop draw would be too much for the van battery, particularly when going through the DC-to-AC conversion by the inverter. But we watched the movie plus the ‘making of’ featurette with no problems—a total of about three hours. I do have to figure out what’s going on with the headphones on my setup--- I have two of them running off a Y cable plugged into the speaker port of the laptop and for some reason the sound on one headphone is very hollow unless you pull out the plug and then put it partially back in. But the other one is fine.
I should also mention the movie ‘Winged Migrations’. We had not seen it in release and only happened upon it in the Movie Gallery in Waterville. It apparently had come out in 2002. It’s an odd film to describe. Four film crews followed different groups of birds on their migrations. This was done by imprinting the birds at birth on handlers who would then keep the birds close to the cameras mounted on boats, cars, and ultralight aircraft. We highly recommend this film—the photography is so outstanding and the photographic angles unprecedented.
(the next section written offline from Mt. Blue State Park campground near Weld, Maine)
On Friday morning (the 16th) we took another sea kayak trip—this one on Grand Lake, one of the Belgrade Lakes and reportedly the one which served as the model for the movie ‘On Golden Pond’.
Conditions were excellent for some refresher training on more challenging conditions. The wind was blowing a steady 12 knots or so, creating nice little two-foot waves. We played in the waves for an hour or so, first taking them head-on, then ferrying across them, then turning quarter-to, all to work on our rusty kayaking skills. We even got to surf a couple of the waves a bit. We also did some gunkholing at the end of the lake but could not go very far into the marsh.
Friday afternoon we headed for Mt. Blue State Park. Off-season camping prices are a reasonable $13 for us out-of-staters. We walked down to the beach and back, then had a well-earned meal of chien-chaud-du-vin (hot dogs sauteed in wine), one of the specialities of our road trips. This reminds me of the ‘it doesn’t get any better than this’ beer commercial. This is pretty terrific living.
(this portion written offline in the Wal-Mart parking lot at Waterville, Maine) Since we were in the Freeport area, we stayed Tuesday night (the 13th) in the municipal parking lot at Freeport… within two blocks or so of LL Bean….with four or five of the big RVs. To some degree that was a mistake. One guy ran his generator until almost midnight so I didn’t get any sleep until early morning but then just slept in a little and I was fine. Labashi didn’t seem to mind the generator noise. Lesson learned--- don’t assume the RV guys are going to shut down their generators at 9 pm like they do when forced to shutdown by such policies in most campgrounds.
While reading a local newspaper, I read about a trail in Harpswell called the Cliff Trail. It features two ‘Fairy-House Building Zones’. A sign at the beginning of the trail tells how it works: you build ‘fairy houses’ out of any dead natural materials, sticks, bark, leaves, stones, etc in either of the two areas designated for this purpose. The houses are limited to a foot square of footprint and a cubic foot of volume, “about the size of a milk crate”, the sign says. If I understood correctly, this was a tradition started on Monhegan Island.
Since Wednesday morning (9/14) was foggy anyway, we thought we’d take a walk on the Cliff Trail and check out some fairy houses! It was a lot of fun and we even joined in by building three of them ourselves. The woods was well suited to the task--- lots of evergreens and birches so the groundcover of needles and lots of deadfall had us imagining we were seeing fairy houses long before we ever reached the building zone for them. Birch bark was available in pieces up to a foot square so that made it pretty easy to come up with a roof. Labashi collected some acorns and pine cones to decorate hers while I searched around for mossy overhangs to close in. We declared ourselves master fairy-house builders in short order.
The article said we should plan about an hour for the one-and-one-half mile trail but it took us almost three hours. We had great fun both looking at the fairy-houses others had built and building our own. The trail was a good one, too. It was mostly pine-needle covered and wound through mixed woods then led us up a steep hill, the other side of which was a cliff overlooking a small bay. We eased along the cliff trail, hoping to see some wildlife and happened upon a big pileated woodpecker—he must have been nearly a foot high. We heard him pecking very slowly and could see pieces of bark falling from a tree in the distance. As we closed in, I had the camera ready but he was too smart for us…no matter how slowly and carefully we advanced, he would only let us get so close then would fly further along the cliff top and we’d start the game again.
After Cliff Trail, we headed for Orr’s Island. I was hoping the kayak shop there would be open but mostly just wanted to get a look at the water. But that was not to be. The fog got thicker as we approached the sea (of course!) and before long we couldn’t see over the water at all. So we decided to take in the Maine Maritime Museum at nearby Bath for the afternoon.
The Maine Maritime Museum was very good. We particularly enjoyed the old buildings and old shipbuilding equipment of the ‘yard. Just the scale of the tools is impressive… I saw a wrench--- just a standard open-ended wrench design--- but as long as I am tall. The part that’s missing from any museum like this is the smells. I’d love to have seen this shipyard as it was building the Wyoming… the wood smells of the sawmill and carpentry shops, the smoky smells of the blacksmith shop, the pine-pitch and tarry smells of the caulking shed, and the pigment and paint-thinner smells of the paint shop would have been fantastic!
We left the museum at closing time and the fog appeared to be clearing so we thought we’d get a look at the ocean again by going down toward Phippsburg and Fort Popham. It wasn’t long, though, until fog closed us in again. We did make it to Fort Popham and as we sat snacking in the van, a sea kayaker came walking up from behind the fort in full gear. I went over and asked him what brand of radar he was using (that’s a joke, of course) and he said the fog was so thick that even with his GPS and compass and thorough knowledge of the area he and his paddling pals had gotten a little lost and into some rougher waters. He had decided to call it a day but his friends were paddling on. I helped him bring his kayak in from the beach and load it on his car rack. While chatting he gave me some recommendations for good paddling spots up at Mount Desert Island and I believe he was gently trying to dissuade me from attempting to paddle the mouth of the Kennebec by talking about how long he had paddled in Maine before attempting it. No worries there, mate! This would be the kind of place to aspire to paddling as you work on your kayaking and navigation skills. I’d think we could do it at slack tide but would not want to be out there in the fastest hours of tide change.
We then drove on to Wiscasset to find a parking spot for the night. I had read about being allowed to overnight in a municipal parking lot off Water Street so we went searching and it didn’t take long. As you might expect, Water Street runs along the water, in this case the Sheepscot River. I noticed a restaurant nearby called ‘Le Garage’ and looked it up in a good guidebook we picked up – ‘An Explorer’s Guide – Maine’ and it was rated as exceptional. The listing drew me in with their ‘light meals’ policy--- you could get smaller portions for under $10 for most entrees--- and a description of a Maine specialty ‘finnan haddie’. I took a chance on it for my meal from the description and learned that finnan haddie is smoked cod and hard-boiled egg cooked, diced and then folded into a white sauce and served over toast. I loved it and can’t wait to try it again somewhere else. Labashi had a very good lime-shrimp with salsa and avocado appetizer.
We then walked through the darkened streets of Wiscasset and had the eerie experience of passing a graveyard (dated 1735) in a very dark area of town just as an overhead streetlight went out. After we passed, the light came back to life. It couldn’t have been timed any better if one of the graveyard residents was playing a little game with the two tourists out after dark.
It rained fairly hard on our little home there in the Wiscasset parking lot overnight. This was supposedly the remnants of Ophelia but it wasn’t windy, just some steady rain. Since the day was supposed to be threatening rain all day and we could see the coast was foggy, we headed for Augusta and the Maine State Museum. It’s rated a ‘gem’ by AAA and as under-appreciated by the Explorer book and they are right (and only $2 per person!). AAA recommended a mimimum of an hour but we again spent more than three hours. I loved little things like the display of a granite quarry derrick. The derrick is of course much to high to fit in the room’s 15-or-so-foot ceiling so at first all you see is the rotating platform of the derrick mast and a short section of the mast and boom as they go up through the ceiling. But as you follow them up to the ceiling, you notice a large block of granite suspended from the ceiling --- just where it would be if the derrick were a real one--- and it’s suspended over the walkway you just came through as you approached the derrick display. Very cool!
We then rushed off to Colby College in Waterville to see their art museum since it was getting a little late in the day. The galleries were filled with interesting paintings. My favorite of the day was a Winslow Homer painting called ‘The Trapper’ and Labashi liked the James McNeill Whistler dry-point drawings and Walter Gay oil paintings. All and all a fine museum, particularly for a small college.
We had a magnificent supper at Wendy’s and rented a DVD for the evening to watch at Parc Wal-Mart.
The ‘Winged Migrations’ DVD worked out very well for us. The movie is excellent in itself but it also allowed me to test out the current draw of my DVD player in my laptop via the inverter I had plugged in to the van’s cigarette lighter. I was a little concerned that the laptop draw would be too much for the van battery, particularly when going through the DC-to-AC conversion by the inverter. But we watched the movie plus the ‘making of’ featurette with no problems—a total of about three hours. I do have to figure out what’s going on with the headphones on my setup--- I have two of them running off a Y cable plugged into the speaker port of the laptop and for some reason the sound on one headphone is very hollow unless you pull out the plug and then put it partially back in. But the other one is fine.
I should also mention the movie ‘Winged Migrations’. We had not seen it in release and only happened upon it in the Movie Gallery in Waterville. It apparently had come out in 2002. It’s an odd film to describe. Four film crews followed different groups of birds on their migrations. This was done by imprinting the birds at birth on handlers who would then keep the birds close to the cameras mounted on boats, cars, and ultralight aircraft. We highly recommend this film—the photography is so outstanding and the photographic angles unprecedented.
(the next section written offline from Mt. Blue State Park campground near Weld, Maine)
On Friday morning (the 16th) we took another sea kayak trip—this one on Grand Lake, one of the Belgrade Lakes and reportedly the one which served as the model for the movie ‘On Golden Pond’.
Conditions were excellent for some refresher training on more challenging conditions. The wind was blowing a steady 12 knots or so, creating nice little two-foot waves. We played in the waves for an hour or so, first taking them head-on, then ferrying across them, then turning quarter-to, all to work on our rusty kayaking skills. We even got to surf a couple of the waves a bit. We also did some gunkholing at the end of the lake but could not go very far into the marsh.
Friday afternoon we headed for Mt. Blue State Park. Off-season camping prices are a reasonable $13 for us out-of-staters. We walked down to the beach and back, then had a well-earned meal of chien-chaud-du-vin (hot dogs sauteed in wine), one of the specialities of our road trips. This reminds me of the ‘it doesn’t get any better than this’ beer commercial. This is pretty terrific living.
posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 12:23
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