Today we went exploring in Portland, ME. Portland is a city with gorgeous architecture, a beautiful waterfront, great views to the Atlantic, a good Trader Joe’s and probably the most lucky pedestrians in the world. Folks here do a lot of walking in the streets, maybe because the downtown area is quite small and getting around does not require much strolling. However, they are very bold when stepping out into the road, assuming the drivers of the cars will follow Maine laws and stop for them. They would all certainly be dead in minutes in California where disregard for pedestrians is rampant. Maine laws allow pedestrians all the crossing rights of royalty and boldly wandering out in front of cars, some with dullards at the wheel, seems to be the norm.
All this wandering about by pedestrians creates almost gridlock-like conditions on the streets, particularly on the waterfront where an entire vacation could be spent traversing six blocks of their narrow, potholed streets where parking in the left turn lane and median seems to be de rigeur. We only made one pass through town because two passes would have prevented us from departing Maine on schedule.
The buildings in Portland are primarily beautiful old brick structures with fanciful architectural highlights and we found them to be quite stunning. There is some kind of big block-like building in the middle of the bay in Portland that we did not explore, maybe because we could not get there by driving within our lifetime.
All the folks in the waterfront area seemed to be having a great time wandering around and blocking efficient traffic flow and, if we had more time and been able to find some of the non-existent parking, we might have joined them in their endeavors. There are a bunch of craft breweries right down on the waterfront and I spotted at least one distillery which makes me believe there is not the same stigma attached to drinking here that one might find in, say, California where drinking is stupidly considered to be unnatural, illegal and quite possibly expensive. California is a remarkable environment for laws that are inconsistent with reality. From my ignorant observations of humanity I have found that almost all people, except those in strange Muslim countries and backward Utah, like to occasionally have a drink without the threat of being incarcerated, beat up by the police and booty-raped by large inmates. It would seem that Maine has transcended idiotic drinking laws like one would find elsewhere. Fireworks are also legal here. I like this state.

We hooked Charlotte to the Barbarian Invader and departed Mt. Desert Island headed west across Maine. It is the first time we have gone mostly west since we started this leg of our trip back on December 28, 2014. We have gone as far north and east as we will go on this particular leg of our journeys through the U.S.A. so I guess we can look at the next few months as a return to our residence in San Diego, CA. I am not real sure that makes me happy because I have found I like the exploring lifestyle although when I get back to San Diego I will get to see my kids which will be great.
We took the Maine Turnpike all the way back to the area around Portland where we exited the freeway and wandered down a short series of roads to our camping spot at a place called Wassamki Springs. There are not a lot of RV parks in Maine and they are substantially more expensive than those in other states and this park was no exception. The park has full hookups, crummy wi-fi and adequate cable TV, a big artificial pond, fair roads and ample suckers filling the available spaces while parting with their hard-earned dollars. It was about a four-and-a-half or five hour drive to get here so we spent the afternoon resting up and loafing.
Fortunately, we had an ample supply of beer which we attempted to reduce somewhat.

Most of the folks who have come to Mt. Acadia for the 4th of July weekend are bundling up all their stuff and their remaining fireworks and departing the area. It is tragic for us, yuk yuk yuk. We loaded our ancient bodies into Charlotte and took off on what would be our last day of sightseeing in this magnificent place.
We used our handy-dandy Federal access pass for the fourth time in as many days and entered Mt. Acadia NP to drive again to the top of Cadillac Mountain to survey the 360 degree view of the Maine coast. The weather was very cooperative and the views were almost endless. Our subsequent route was pretty chaotic with some of the drive on the coastline of Mt. Desert Island and the remainder crisscrossing the interior.
If I have my way, every time I get close to this portion of the U.S. I will visit this extraordinarily scenic and beautiful venue. The scenery changes dynamically as the light changes, clouds pass over and we find new pathways around the island, much to our delight.
Regrettably, we were obliged to spend the rest of the day prepping for our departure tomorrow but we were able to take a short break during which we popped over to the local lobster joint for a farewell trip to the trough for shellfish that were dumb enough to stumble into some lobsterman’s trap. Too bad for the lobsters. They were very tasty.

Happy 4th of July.
Today we elected to go somewhere other than Bar Harbor because we noted as we left our campground that there was a steady stream of traffic on the highway headed in that direction. We are sure Bar Harbor has nice fireworks but we are also not fans of seething, squished masses of tourists awed by chemistry while crowded into small spaces.
We chose instead to explore the Schoodic Peninsula which is a portion of Mt. Acadia NP that exists on the mainland of Maine, pun unintended. This portion of Acadia is primeval and surprisingly uncrowded so we were able to drive there almost without seeing oncoming traffic. It was a cloudy day during our visit and the thick forest cover on the peninsula created dark, mysterious conditions that were delightful. The ground is covered with ferns, moss and lichens such that the soil is not visible. Large outcroppings of granite and basalt dot the landscapes and, since the place is a peninsula, the ocean is the view on the other side of the road. There are lots of birds, including an eagle we spotted on the rocky shoreline that was being harassed by seagulls who apparently found the eagle’s presence uncomfortable.
At the end of the peninsula are a series of small parking areas and pull-outs so folks can get out of their cars and explore the shoreline. The views are stunning. Mount Desert Island, the home of Mt. Acadia NP, is plainly visible across the strait and provides a spectacular backdrop to the turbulent ocean in the foreground.
We believe we made the correct destination choice today and we were fortunate not to have to spend the day with masses of the easily impressed. Schoodic Peninsula is truly magnificent but only very few folks seem to be aware that Mt. Acadia NP includes this beautiful area. It is not really shown on the official Mt. Acadia NP maps other than as a small detail inset that does not give any clue as to the location of this don’t-miss venue. I wonder if this omission was intentional because nobody seems to go to this place. We recommend a drive through this part of the world to our readers but ask that they don’t tell anybody else about it. This seems like the kind of place easily ruined by overuse.

We got a little earlier start today but it probably made no difference because we basically followed yesterday morning’s course through Mt. Acadia NP except we were bright enough to omit the utterly mind-numbing foray into the vehicle-trapping one-way grid through downtown Bar Harbor. We kept to the loop road followed yesterday along with some side-trips down roads we were not too sure we should follow. Every one of them turned out okay, though. We made another trip to the top of Cadillac Mountain where the weather was again very cooperative by being absolutely clear with the exception of some tiny puffy clouds directly above us. We took another spin through Otter Cove where there is a very sturdy-looking stone bridge passing over stone culverts with a vigorous tidal flow from the upper lagoon to the sea. We stopped in a visitor center for the park that did not have two thousand people rummaging through the merchandise where Peg picked up some artwork postcards of a type we have been able to get in other national parks.
This place is great to visit with amazing views around each bend in the road. You should get used to the idea that you will not be able to maintain a speed much over about 20 miles per hour because there is just too much to see and keeping your eyes on the road is difficult when the surrounding views are so stunning. Our return leg to the campground took only roads we had not traversed the day before and we ultimately ended up back at our new favorite lobster joint at the Trenton Bridge. This time we just ordered lobster and one ear of corn-on-the-cob and the price for the two monsters was less than $40. We pigged out. It was disgusting and we loved every minute of it. We bow our heads to the unfortunate but very tasty brave lobsters who gave their lives for us. We salute them….particularly their meat.

We slept pretty well last night after our wimp-tiring long drive here. We woke up late, took showers, made a big breakfast and then popped into Charlotte for our first Mt. Acadia foray. We got started down Hwy 3 towards Bar Harbor, which is pronounced “BahHAHbuh” by the locals. The road is a nice drive through some wooded areas with little quaint motels alongside the highway. There are several lobster places in case you ever get hungry passing along this stretch of road. The entrance to Mt. Acadia NP is in Hull’s Cove, right before you get into Bar Harbor. We took the Mt. Acadia turn and arrived initially at a visitor center parking lot where every parking space seemed to be filled with cars pointing in all directions. We bravely chickened out and went directly for the loop road.
Despite our initial, ultimately correct selection of the loop road as our route, we stupidly decided on an alternate plan that would allow us to drive into Bar Harbor to drop off an envelope at the post office so the letter could be postmarked as originating in BahHAHbuh and arriving at Peg’s sister’s house with the spiffy postmark. We were idiots. Straying from an original, perfectly sound plan to engage in a whim is not the recipe for success.
We arrived on the very first street in town and were immediately trapped within a one-way grid that has streets entering some blocks as two-way and emerging on the other end as one-way. The roads are very narrow and there are places where you go in but don’t come out. Alongside the substandard sized streets are myriad businesses which sell cleverly-packaged Chinese-made official Maine and Mt. Desert Island curios and souvenirs to the tourists who are not busy clogging the miserable streets with mindless, almost zombie-like meanderings within the traffic non-flow. Even the U.S. Post Office Building downtown has a drive-up U.S. Mail drop box that can only be approached by official USPS vehicles maybe due to the very-real concern that ISIS might blow up a lobster house or post office.
After some spirited discussions about whose fault it was that we were trapped in Hell, we found a road that exited town and we returned to the Mt. Acadia NP loop road vowing never to return to Bar Harbor, at least in the summer. Once back on the loop road, we ascended to the top of Cadillac Mountain, the highest point in Mt. Acadia and maybe all of Maine. This place has absolutely magnificent views 360 degrees around and the surrounding vistas of islands, forests, rocky shorelines, the sea and inland lakes is stunning. Parking, however, is not too available because of the volume of visitors so we ended up parking in a lot about 300 yards from the top where we ate fruit and nuts and marveled at the views. Weather was very cooperative.
Descending Cadillac Mountain, we again picked up the loop road around the east half of the island except where we strayed onto roads that would allow us to skirt the coastline. There are some short sections of sandy beach but I think the most spectacular sections of this place’s coastline is those parts where the multi-colored granite cliffs drop directly into the sea. There are gorgeous stone arch bridges you pass over and under strewn about the roads and most of the roads out here were either one-way loop or uninhabited two-lane blacktop routes to nifty little communities, coves and hidden harbors. There must be a big boating crowd because there are a shitload of boats tied to buoys around the entire island, most of them in little coves with less than 50 boats. Most of the pleasure boats appear to be made of wood and quite pretty. Lots of lobster fishermen are tied up at the spaces in between the nice tourist cruisers. Not a lot of big, ostentatious mega-yachts were noted; mostly just well-made (and I imagine very tough) wood pleasure boats 30 feet or less.
We tried a different lobster joint today called Lunt’s Lobster Pound where Peg got a lobster roll and I went with fried clams and a haddock sandwich. The bill was a bit smaller than the Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound but it should have been. The food was certainly nominal but we liked the other joint better.
Just a little travel tidbit here – we started our trip in Charlotte Taylor Wilson, our truck, towing the Barbarian Invader, our fifth wheel trailer, 53 weeks ago. We seem to enjoy it more every day and hope to continue until we can’t do it anymore. We had no idea whether or not we would like this lifestyle when we started this back in June, 2014. Strangely, both Peg and I have found this form of retirement very relaxing and great fun. It is not too expensive if you can keep the camping costs down and we have both seen bucket list grade stuff almost to the point where it is overwhelming. We have been fortunate enough to enjoy the different treasures in 25 states and the District of Columbia in the last year. If we continue according to our extremely hazy projections for the next 5 months, we will visit 14 more states before we return to our home in San Diego for some RV maintenance. This has been great fun so far and we don’t foresee a downturn unless one of us gets real sick or craps out. I hope we get quite a bit more of this because it is terrific.

We pulled stakes at Portsmouth, NH, and bit the bullet and drove up the toll road into Maine. It is I-95 from the NH border to Bangor where we turned off on a secondary road for the last hour before arriving at Mount Desert Island, home to Acadia National Park. It was a long drive for us wimps since we have not had to travel more than about 2 hours from one campsite to another and today’s drive was about 5 hours. Our timing was impeccable because we packed up in the rain, drove all the way here in the rain and arrived at Mount Desert Narrows RV park close to Bar Harbor, ME, in the rain.
Even though this an Encore park and supposedly affiliated with TT, the rates here are high compared with what we have recently paid, mostly because of our TT & RPI memberships. We have recently been paying $0 per night to stay in TT parks and $20 a night for RPI parks, all allegedly part of the TT system. Encore, however, charges $86 per night to normal folks and gives us a discount where we get in for about $49 per night. The good news is that the park is quite nice and we have a drive-through campsite with full hookups and CATV for the price.
The little bit of Mount Desert that we saw on the way in today was gorgeous. Mount Desert is an island with a two-lane causeway back to the mainland about 3 miles from our campsite. Sharp-eyed spouse and crony, Peggy, spotted a lobster joint on our way in and we returned there (Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound) for a couple of lobsters for din-din. This is the joint – lobster is served by the pound, selected live, thrown onto a scale to check his/her weight, inserted into a mesh sack and popped into one of about 6 or 8 big cauldrons full of vigorously boiling water before being retrieved and handed over for dismemberment and consumption. Cooked lobster is $9.95 per pound and we killed a bit under 4 pounds before waddling away happily. The price seemed okay and the lobster was great. I suggest you forgo biscuits but the corn on the cob was tasty. Drinks, both leaded and unleaded, are pricey here so just go with the lobster. BYOB.

This morning we woke up and decided to go on an aimless tour of the surrounding NH countryside. We left the maps at home and took off, initially going west. We ended up driving through some absolutely gorgeous rural areas with spectacular New England-style architecture. After a while, we turned north, mostly, and wandered about an hour that direction before heading east towards Portsmouth.
Before we made it to the Portsmouth area we found a terrific rural meat market where we stocked up on steaks, sausage, sliced honey maple turkey, local porter (of course) and some produce before continuing. Delightfully, Peg detected the presence of a Trader Joe’s market on the internet phone and we made another stop there before heading home. Thank God for Trader Joe’s. They have great food at fair prices and, since we are going into the wilds for the next week, we were able to fully stock our larders before going to the land of difficult shopping.

Today we decided to explore the area around Portsmouth, NH, which ended up being quite enjoyable. We started by heading to a restaurant called Linda’s in Seabrook and the food was great. From there, Peggy’s computer/phone let her know there was an L. L. Bean store right near the restaurant so we made a stop there and only left about $100 poorer. From the L. L. Bean store we departed towards our original destination. As you approach Portsmouth, at least from the SW, the residential buildings transition from nice, ordinary rural structures to very nice wood urban residences and masonry commercial and governmental buildings. The churches are quite beautiful.
Portsmouth streets are little narrow suckers but they are also one-way in quite a few places and even driving an enormous leviathan like our king cab Ford F-250 on the city roads was easy and not terrifying. The working waterfront is immediately adjacent to the main downtown commercial area so you can stroll around about a 10 block area and see most of the neat stuff in town. The sidewalks are brick pavers and grading was not their big claim to fame here so access if you are disabled or wheelchair-bound would be problematic. One must remember to look down often when navigating the ‘hoods here because if you don’t, you will be tripped up by the sidewalk surfaces and end up doing faceplants.
Despite the crummy sidewalks, downtown Portsmouth is gorgeous and strolling around is a treat. The buildings in the commercial area are pretty small so they can put about 20 businesses on each side of the street in each block. Fortunately for Peggy and me, there are bars and taverns liberally strewn throughout the downtown area so we barely had to cover any distance before being able to take side-trips into places where we were able to get porter. There are some nice places to sit down in the streets so if you get pooped, there are ample spots to sit and recuperate or sober up.
The first bar we went into, Portsmouth Brewing, did not have porter but we had a beer anyway. However, not having porter for us to drink is a sin only forgivable by God so we determined that we would be obliged to find a drink in some venue where they did have porter. In the Portsmouth Brewing taproom, they had an ad indicating that if you could produce your Portsmouth bar bill to the management at another brewery called Smuttynose Brewing, they would give you a flight of 4 sample beers from their products for half price. This offer was more than we could resist so we entered Smuttynose’s address into the Garmin and promptly arrived at Smuttynose. We were happy to discover that Smuttynose has not one but two porters which we felt obliged to try. These guys must really know what they are doing because their porters were great and we drank more than we should have. It was neat.
Before we became too blotto to drive we hopped back into Charlotte and drove home. When we arrived, we ended up striking up a conversation with our neighbors, one of whom had two rhubarb custard pies in her possession. Rhubarb pie has never been on my list of favorites but the neighbors brought over some of the pie which initially only Peggy tried. She was making yummy noises so I suppressed my cowardly instincts and tried a bite. I have now expanded my list of favorites because this pie was fabulous and I regretted only having one piece.
We can get four channels on the antenna here at Newfields. Unfortunately, they are all versions of the same PBS programming so our options are limited to cooking shows with boring hostesses or travelogues about places where you don’t want to visit. I ended my adventures for today by falling asleep to the background noises associated with Antiques Roadshow. Did you know that there are actually people that find worthless junk in their attics and can find out if their junk is valueless from an expert? If this kind of idiocy appeals to you, be sure to tune in this plainly worthwhile program.

Last night it started to rain around 8:00 PM and it was only a drizzle. The rainfall seemed to be increasing by about midnight and by this morning there was a colossal torrent of rain falling which turned the Gateway to the Gateway to Cape Cod campground into a nifty pattern of pools with some tiny spots where soil was visible above the widespread lakes. Strange items, some of which used to be live creatures, were bobbing around in the newly-established lagoons of murky water.
Unfortunately for us, today was a designated travel day. I was not eager to depart the GTTGTCC campground in the crummy conditions but we had a reservation at our next destination and would have to pay the fee whether we made it there or not. We got all our stuff stowed and hooked Charlotte to the Invader in a moderate rainstorm. We left the campsite by about 10:45 and noted the weather seemed to be deteriorating by the minute. By the time we made it to I-495 (about 4 miles) the rain was steady.
It is possible that I may have commented on the quality of Massachusetts roads earlier but I was unable to truly recognize the horror associated with driving on their roads until I had the opportunity to travel along them in lousy weather. In addition to being paved by workmen unable to understand fundamental concepts like square and/or level, the engineers have designed the pavements such that they do not drain. The asphalt mixes they have used are extremely slippery and any attempts to go near the throttle result in whining noises from the rear tires as they lose traction. Coupled with the terrifying Massachusetts drivers that like to take slow lane exits directly from the fast lane, traveling over these alleged highways is an exercise in abject terror. Even the newly repaired sections of I-95, one of my least favorite roads and the main north-south freeway on the U.S. east coast, were lumpy and seemed to have been paved by dropping asphalt paving mix from high-altitude bombers. The sections over the bridges, and there are a lot of them, have yawning craters in the surface which have a tendency to try to throw your vehicle over the guardrail into the river or pond or railroad tracks below. There were several times when I thought some poo may have come out.
However, we were finally able to leave the memorable Massachusetts highway system behind because we crossed the line into New Hampshire. We drove a very circuitous route around the only section of I-95 in N.H. (because despite being a Federal Interstate highway, the state has turned it into a toll road) before arriving in the rain at our new campground in Newfields, NH, called Great Bay Campground. The campground has full hookups and pretty good wi-fi but is a bit challenging to find. When we called for directions, the host told us to drive to a certain Shell gas station and to take the road that runs alongside the right side of the station. We followed his directions and soon arrived behind a gas station with a medium-sized parking area and two blue dumpsters. Peg exited the car and looked down a skinny dirt road that started sort of behind the dumpsters and quickly saw two signs that both read “Do Not Enter.” We called the campground host again for the second time in about 4 minutes and he told us the signs telling us not to enter were not really do not enter signs but actually a greeting to lost travelers. We entered where we should not have entered and, after driving on some squirrelly dirt road we emerged into an RV park where we checked in, set up and promptly had a few drinks to get us settled down from our exhilarating experiences.
Am I ever glad to be out of Massachusetts. We will explore tomorrow once the hangover goes away. We see that I-95 is a toll road in NH but, since NH only has 11 miles of coastline and 95 runs right next to the coast, we figure they can’t stick us for too much money unless they are very creative or bandits.