Maine/Vermont Day 5-6: Lobstah, Lobstah, Lobstah

Here we are in the Easternmost point of the U.S., the first place to get daybreak ... and we sleep through it.  Oh well.  I can't imagine it looks much different, even though it's hitting us before every American billionaire, working stiff, and President Obama.  I'll just take it on faith.  I'm on vacation.

Eventually we did get up and ate breakfast, then headed for Quoddy Head State Park.  We see our first lighthouse there.  It's giant, candy-coloured, and largely unnecessary (thanks to GPS, which largely cuts through fog).  But it's a tourist magnet.  At first I thought it was just the symbolism - when you wander through the foggy parts of life, when decisions are far from clear, you want a light that says, "Go wherever you want, but not here!"  I guess there is something inherently beautiful about a lighthouse.  Nothing in architecture is quite like it.

Amy and I hiked along the coast.  My favorite attraction was the peat bog.  It was set inland about a quarter of a mile, and so it's called a coastal plateau bog.  I didn't know much about bogs.  It's one of the four kinds of wetlands, along with swamps, marshes and fens.  Basically, a bog's water is too acidic, which makes it hard to grow things in and hard to decompose the dead stuff.  The plants just grow a little, then die, then sit on top of other dead plants, unable to melt much further.  What does survive are really weird species of carnivorous and out-of-place plants like apple-berry.  It's surreal and colorful.  It's like Dante Seventh Circle of Hell, with dead plants piled on top of one another instead of dead people.  More peaceful, though.

And so we returned our campsite, made some fettucini and salad, then built a nice fire from some wood we got in a stand along the way.  Amy said this was the best time of year to camp - no one hogging the showers or the laundry room. And that's cool, but it's mostly my camping experience anyway.  Out there in South Dakota, it was all solitude and I loved that.  All you could hear were the squirrels slowly dying of starvation.

The next day we broke camp, and I cured my persistent headache with a Coca Cola.  (It's like "Oh yeah.  I have a caffeine addiction.  I was so busy drinking coffee I didn't notice.")  We got a tip to go to Pemaquid Point lighthouse, because you can actually go up in it.  The view was really fantastic, as you can see here:

The surf was deafening here, the light was 150 years old and really cool.  Turns out that this was the second lighthouse built here.  The first one, in 1830, crumbled almost immediately because they used sea water in the mortar mixture.  "Pretty stupid," the museum keeper shook his head.  It sounded pretty resourceful to me!  Good thing I don't build lighthouses.

The museum in the lighthouse living quarters housed relics from the surrounding area.  A "stuffed" 22 lb lobster looked down on you from a display case.  My niece had a stuffed lobster when she was little - it wasn't nearly as scary.  In my favorite photo, a five year old girl on a dock was flanked by two lobsters that, when balanced on the tip of their tail, were as big as she was.  I'll bet she had wicked nightmares!

Our camp site in New Harbor Maine was almost deserted.  An older couple from Ohio found us wandering around, and asked us where we were from.  "Ithaca?  Home of the Moosewood?"  Their faces lit up.  They talked rapturously about their dog-eared Moosewood Cookbook and their organic garden.  Foodies ... I love them!  We asked them where to eat and they said "Shaw's Fish and Lobster Wharf for dinner, and The Cupboard for breakfast.  Best breakfast this side of New Orleans."

So we went to Shaw's, and it was all that.  Talk about fresh!  The seafood was still dripping wet from the ocean.  The menu is all "Market Price", and if they didn't have it fresh-off-the-boat, it wasn't available.  I had salmon with bbq sauce.  Best salmon I've ever bitten into - just a little cruncy, no rubberiness at all, just flaky and mild all the way.  Amy had a lobster roll - basically tuna salad with lobster instead of tuna, but on a New England hot dog roll.  Tasty!  We finished off with a couple of Maine wild blueberry desserts - cheesecake for me, pie for her.  Maine blueberries are luxurious after a steady diet of giant, watery New York and Jersey blueberries.  Outtasite!

We sunk into our camp, very satisfied, and read our Kindles by the campfire.  One of our few remaining neighbors has a 6 foot tall bonfire next to their RV, which seems pretty superfluous to me.  But hey.  Live and let live.   I'm relaxed and pondering this state of Vacationland, as they call Maine.  We'll definitely be back.  But first we have some biking to do in Vermont...

Maine/Vermont Day 3/4: Taco Night!

Camping.  I dropped it like a hot potato when I left Boy Scouts in 1985.  It's not that I hated it, but camping requires a deliberate attention to the little details of life (like where you're gonna poop) that I found increasingly foreign.  I got used to counting on certain things being there (like a bathroom) and using my time to move "forward", I suppose.

Then Amy told me about Taco Night.

Amy has been a camper all her life, never going through a long 30-year drought like I did.  And she told me stories.  When Amy and her late husband Carter and her son Terry went camping, they always designated one night as Taco Night.

And I thought, "That's what's been missing!"  Tacos are just meant for campouts: easy, tasty, yet well-balanced.  They are more forgiving than cobbler or chicken (why they pushed these difficult-to-prepare items at Scout Camp is beyond me.  Might as well do souffle!)  The only thing you can't do is bake the shells, so they quickly crack and split into messy pieces.  But that's what the ground is for.   If there's one thing you've got a lot of on a campout, it's ground!

We set out for Maine on Tuesday.  To ease ourselves into Vacationland, as it is called on the Welcome To Maine sign, we decided to do our first night at Captain Swift's Bed and Breakfast in Camden.  Ok it's not camping, but it's transitional camping.  Camden is a beautiful port town with a wavy, rugged little inset harbor.  It has a town park and a gazebo overlooking everything.  Boats of all kinds of analog and digital varieties dotted the water.

And lobstah!  We hit Cappy's Chowder House for dinner.   Amy asked the waitress whether a whole lobstah was hard-to-eat and distusbing to look at.  She replied, "I'm a vegetarian and I have no problem with it."  Then we saw one delivered to the table next to us.  It was all antenna and feelers and claws, and it was lying on its back with its belly erupting meat.  It was the movie Alien in a plastic basket.  No thanks.  Amy opted for Lobstah Tacos and I for Seafood Chowdah and a Lobstah Slidah.  (They talk funny around heah.)  Tasty!  And it's proof that lobstah is more than a butter-delivery-vehicle.

Ah but Captain Swift's had the best breakfast evah ... I mean ever.  A baked apple with cinnamony crumbly core and drizzled with a little maple syrup.  Then french toast ... but that's like calling Rhapsody in Blue "a ditty."  It was fluffy and swirled on the inside, like a cinnamon roll.  The outside was very crispy, with a struesel topping that quoted the baked apple.  It had no trace of raw egg sogginess, yet it was custardy.  Kind of like good bread pudding, but less heavy.  Three silver-dollar-sized slices of Canadian Bacon with a cube of pineapple on each flanked the dish.  Oh so good!

On Wednesday we headed further up the coast to Eastport, the most Northeastern corner of the United States, and the one the sunrise is supposed to hit first.  From the moment we hit Seaview Campground, we were the bain of the owner's existence.  In early October there were only a couple of occupied RV's left and no tent campers.  We paid for our site and looked around for it ... but with no other campers around for reference points, we couldn't find it.  We drove around for ten minutes, backed into a tree (at 5mph - no injuries!), and the owner came out and yelled "IT'S OVER THERE!" She obviously had went on her own vacation in her mind and we were ruining it.

We set up camp and had half an afternoon to wander, ending up at nearby Shackford Head State Park .. a tiny one, but with a nice nature walk and great views of the bay and Canada.  My cell phone warned me every five seconds of roaming charges - though we were still in the states, the nearest cell tower was in Canada.  All of a sudden we gained an hour of Nova Scotia time which threw my internal clock off.

I tossed my cell phone into the bay.  We were wondering what the large rings in the bay were, finding out later they were Atlantic Salmon beds.  This explains the huge charges I later found on my phone bill.  Evidently they like to talk to their buddies usptream.

And then Taco Night!  It was everything I hoped for, and I devoured half a dozen of those tasty Pockets O' Joy.  At 6:30, night had descended.  We had tried to get firewood early, but the owner had long abandoned her post at the office, so no go.  We climbed into our tent and read our Kindles.  Amy's more modern one had a built-in light, but I needed an LED headlamp to read mine.  I looked like a miner on his lunch break.

We fell asleep to the sound of the foghorn.  Evidently it worked because no boats suddenly appeared in our tent.  For this we are thankful.

Maine/Vermont Days 1-2: Drippy

Is there divine justice in getting a cold before a vacation?  Like, "You can have fun, but you're gonna pay for it up front!"  Looking at it this way proves how much I need a vacation.  It's when I think I have things figured out, when life looks like a zero-sum game on a spreadsheet, and when things are too organized.

A vacation is like Godzilla romp-stomping through your neat little world-view.  You need that.

Already it was not quite as planned.  Since January, Amy and I had planning a trip to Nova Scotia, then to Vermont.  Then two days before I picked up her passport.  I wanted to see the photo - it's hot, like you'd expect.  It also expired last month.  Ooops.  It would suck trying to get back into the United States with an expired passport.  (Visions of me leaving Amy at the border with a dozen Tim Horton's and a six pack of Labatt's).

Within hours, Amy had switched everything from Nova Scotia to Maine, which is just about the same thing anyway.  Both are way, way East.   Both have camp sites and mountains.  Both have ocean spray and lobstahs.  The moral: always vacation with those-who-are-flexible.

Saturday was our last day at home, so I spent it fighting my cold agressively.  I rested, drank plenty of orange juice and watched Sesame Street in my jammies.  I vaguely remember this combination working as a kid.  I have to tell you, after 47 years, Sesame Street is still DA BOMB!  It's funny, wise, and very imaginative.  The segments are a lot longer, but I really dig both Elmo's World  and Abby's Fairy School.  They are real out-of-the-box thinkers.  They should both be hired at Internet startups.  Super Grover is awesome.  Big Bird is still kind of an idiot, but you can't hate him.  And Ernie and Bert still have the relationship to which all couples should aspire.   I mean, if they are a couple ... oh, whatever.

Anyway my aggressive therapy worked ... until I got in the car the next day.  Then I was dribbling all over the place.  There were not enough Kleenixes in the car, and maybe not enough in the state of New York.


We spent the first day driving as far as Woodstock Vermont, where Amy's in-laws Carie and Randy live.  Carie is Amy's late husband's sister, and I met them both last year in Michigan.  They're very cool!  Carie is a superb gardneer, a semi-pro entomologist, and a part-timer at a gift shop in historic Woodstock Randy is a master carpenter and a retired Mennonite minister.  In the winter Randy runs the engine room of a small Alaskan cruise boat, while Carolyn joins him for some trips.  They are considering doing the same thing on a Mexican cruise this year.  They live in a quintessential Vermont house.

When we got there, Carolyn had a cold as well.  But fortunately we planned an extra day of downtime.  So as Amy walked into town and dodged all the elderly leaf-peepers in Woodstock - this time of year is the busiest - I sat on the porch sniffling and reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables while watching the leaves change color.

Carie and I talked about daguerreotypes, which were all the rage in Hawthorne's day.  The precursor to film, daguerreotypes required a much longer exposure time - often 5 minutes or longer.  A daguerreotype selfie?  Forget it.  You couldn't hold the camera still that long.

Hawthorne wisely pointed out that everyone in a daguerreotype looked glum.  I noticed that too.  It was an odd comfort to find that people in the 1840's were really as happy as you and me ... they just didn't show it.

Dinners were fantastic.  Amy and I brought some leftover vegetables from our CSA, and Carolyn prepared Delicata Squash with maple syrup ... I am not a squash eater, but this made me a believer.  We had grilled pork one night, and a beautiful pot roast the other, with CSA turnips and potatoes as embellishments.  In other words: New England food.  Already I started to detach from my old New York life.  So what'll be next?