Just spent five days driving around (and doing some walking, too!) in Maine (and a bit of New Hampshire). Got home last night and went thud. Would have spent longer, but I have a minor medical thing today.
Miles Driven: 1520. Maine is large. (By comparison, my
big trip around the US was 11,700 or so, but I was frequently going on smaller roads this time.) From Boston to San Diego is about twice what I just drove. Maine is big, did I mention?)
Places I Went I’ve Vaguely Wanted To Go To For Eons: Baxter State Park (because Katahdin! End of the Appalachian Trail! Katahdin’s knife edge!), Quoddy Head and Lubec (easternmost points in the US!), Fort Kent (end of Route 1), Caribou, Allagash, Millinocket, Farmington (this is technically quite boring, but a friend used to live there), Skowhegan, Athens (as a representative of the zillions of places in Maine named after somewhere else)*, Machias/Machias Port, and Boothbay/Boothbay Harbor.
(Maine’s one of the places I hung out in a lot, growing up, so I have a lot of places I’ve vaguely heard about and wanted to go.)
Animals Seen: several moose, a herd of alpacas, one llama, the requisite farm animals (plus some miniature horses and, separately, some ponies), a woodchuck, possibly a beaver and definitely its dam, various cats and dogs, hawks a-plenty, a loon, woodpeckers, various ducks and geese, a bunch of ravens (and crows), a plethora of other unidentified birds, an eft, various other salamandery and tadpoley things, a lot of bear scat but no bears, a pheasant, a porcupine galumphing away in the opposite direction, and possibly a fisher. I did not see any turkeys, which is ironic since it’s turkey hunting season. I suspect they’re all in hiding. I also saw no deer, either dead or alive.
Places That Were Closed: Practically the entirety of tourist Maine. (Most tourist attractions don’t open til nearer Memorial Day.) Since I knew this to begin with, it mostly didn’t bother me, and anyway, sometimes I went anyway. For example, the actual fort at Fort Kent was technically closed, but I wandered around outside. I couldn’t go inside, but it’s small, and it has a lot of tourist information outside it. This is true of Quoddy Head, too. (Things like York Wild Animal Kingdom, OTOH, I just didn’t go to. Alas.)
Also, and this did bug me briefly when I got there, technically, Baxter State Park is (or was) currently closed due to snow, though I wandered around in it for a few hours anyway. I didn’t want to hike extensively because there weren’t any rangers, and I hadn’t told anyone specifically the days I’d been pondering going, since I hadn’t actually expected to go. So, since I didn’t want to, as just one example of something that could go wrong, break a leg and not be found for A Long Period Of Time, I didn’t hang out very long.
Places I Wanted To Go, But Didn’t, Aside From Closed Tourist Traps: The northernmost point in the continental US, since I am the kind of nerd who likes that kind of thing. Thing is, that very large section of Maine is owned by the logging companies; they allow people (most especially outdoorsy types) in, but you have to go through checkpoints and defer to logging trucks, and the way they phrased it made me not want to get anywhere near them. So I didn’t. (Google maps keeps insisting these roads don’t exist. They do. They’re just private.)
Also, Canada, since I lack a passport. (Yes, the entirety of it, but most especially New Brunswick.) The thing there is that, of course, Francophone Maine, of which there is more than you would expect, is intimately tied to Canada, so you can’t really understand Maine without understanding Canada (and you can’t understand that area of Canada and Maine without understanding the Acadians), but basically, I learned a lot in the gaps and holes.
Also, I didn’t get to go to Campobello Island. (Former home of Roosevelts. I am an amatuer historian and an Eleanor Roosevelt partisan.) I shall take my mother someday.
Number Of Times I Locked My Keys In My Car: None! Hosannah. I did, however, leave my suitcase behind in Lubec. (Luckily, I remembered it about 10 minutes down the road.)
I may or may not do a travelogue. They’re kinda boring to other people. On the other hand, this is my own durn blog. We’ll see.
*Places In Maine Named After Somewhere Else, An Incomplete List: Carthage, Norway, Sweden, Peru, Moscow, Medford, Milton, Hebron, Berlin, Madrid (now unincorporated), Athens, Rome, Mt. Vernon, Naples, Poland, AND SO ON. There is a sign that exemplifies this phenomenon. (Which I did not go to, because I was too busy going to a town with a bookstore, instead. Priorities!)Crosposted from Dreamwidth. Current DW
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