Bar Harbor, Maine to Freeport, Maine – 147 miles
Note: Sorry for the long delay in getting this posted, but we've been staying in a lot of state parks that didn't have wifi. We're now in Alexandria at Russell and Carol's house, so I'm using his network.
I have
no excuse for not writing the past few nights other than I simply haven’t felt
like it. After a while, it becomes a
chore, and chores are not what this trip is about. But here’s a quick recap since I last posted:
When we
left Amherst on the 13th, we entered New Brunswick for the second
time. The first town we came to was
Moncton, the site of the shooting of the RCMP officers a couple of weeks
ago. We stopped long enough to watch an
interesting tidal phenomenon in the river there, the tidal “bore” as the rising
tide comes up the river from the Bay of Fundy, creating a surf-like wave as it
advances. The wave is only a couple of feet
high, but there were four surfers out in the river, hoping to catch the wave
and ride it up the river. We saw the
wave come around the bend in the river a half-mile or so downstream from where
we stood, and watched as the surfers caught the wave and started their
ride. Two of them fell almost
immediately, but the other two stayed on the curl until they were abreast of
us, then first one then the other lost the wave and fell into the muddy waters
– the river is quite muddy, as it was over on the Nova Scotia side the day
before. The land here is red dirt, and
the bottom of the bay and the rivers are the same red dirt. With all the mixing caused by the rise and
fall of the extreme tides, it creates a dirty reddish-brown mud that colors the
water well-out into the bay.
Leaving
Moncton, we drove down the estuary a few miles to the Hopewell Rocks, an
interesting collection of standing rock columns that are famous for the stark
difference in their appearance at low tide and at high tide. We arrived at near high tide, so we only saw
the rocks as small islets. Not wanting
to wait around six or seven hours for the tide to fall, we were content to let
the images in countless photos by others show us what the rock columns look
like at low tide when they stand like sentinels off from the cliffs of the
nearby headlands.
Continuing
further south, we spent the night at a campground on the beach at the small
town of St Martins, a few miles north of St John, a large town just north of
the US border. It started raining soon
after we went to bed and rained heavily most of the night. We were, however, able to get a brief glimpse
of the full moon rising over the water before the rain started, although it was
just through a narrow gap in the clouds.
The next morning we drove down into town and had a real Tex-Mex
breakfast of huevos rancheros for me and an egg-and-chorizo burrito for
Jeanette. The restaurant was owned and
run by a former Denver police officer and his wife, a native of El Paso. She, of course, was the source of the recipes
for the authentic Tex-Mex fare. It
turned out that Mike, the owner, and we have a mutual friend in Tom Richey, who
is also a former Denver police officer.
Tom and his wife Diane were some of the first people we met when we
moved to Denver back in 1989.
We
crossed the border on Saturday morning, returning to a land where we no longer
had to convert kilometers to miles and litres to gallons, making our compliance
with speed limits and stress over watching the gas pump climb up to 70, 80, 90
or more litres every time we filled up much less a source of anxiety. We made it as far as Mt Desert Island, better
known as the location of the town of Bar Harbor, Maine, and Acadia National
Park, before we put down stakes for three nights and two days. We were enthralled with the park, its
geology, and especially some wonderful gardens, but less so with the town of
Bar Harbor, which is a typical gateway town to a popular national park, filled
with T-shirt and trinket shops and countless eateries. Think Estes Park on the seashore, with a cruise
ship or two added to the mix, and the wildlife theme being moose and lobster
rather than elk and bear. Ho hum.
The
highlight of today was a stop in Freeport, Maine, the home of L.L. Bean of mail
order catalog fame. After an hour in the
big factory store, we bought enough stuff to fill up the remaining extra space
in our motorhome, so at least we know we won’t be doing much more shopping for
the rest of this trip.
That’s
it for now. I’ll post this when we have
wifi, and hopefully will post more regularly for the rest of the trip. By the way, we’re at 6747 miles now,
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