Maine - As a rule of thumb, the higher the humidity, the greater the discomfort.....

July 8 – 11, 2006
The border crossing at St. Stephen, New Brunswick / Calais, Maine was ridiculously busy. Traffic clogged the main shopping street of St. Stephen as we inched forward in the stifling heat. It’s a silly little station on a bridge across the St. Croix River, with hardly any room to manoeuvre a big rig but Fernie wriggled Maggie into the slot like a champ.


The Walmart in Calais was superb – a large tree-lined area far from the crowd but the ‘No Overnight Parking’ signs deflated our pleasure. Not to be defeated, I marched into Walmart and asked permission to stay and was told “Sure honey! Park over by the trees”. Moral – Never take no for an answer.

Gas prices were an immediate relief at $3.05US per US gallon – equivalent to 92 cents Cdn per litre. We’d been used to paying $1.11 to $1.17 per litre in the Maritimes. The prices decreased as we drove south. $2.829 US was the lowest we saw in Maine.

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Maine was extremely humid – even when I didn’t feel hot, trickles of sweat sneaked down the nape of my neck and along my brow. It was a strange sensation but when it got hot, it was horrible. What is it that makes the east so humid whereas Vancouver isn’t?

Bangor, Maine is about twenty miles from the shore, as the crow (or the seagull) flies so lacks the ocean breezes that relieve the heat. It was a pleasant town though to alight in for a couple of days. We chose a Super Walmart (a mega store complete with a large grocery department and open 24 hours) in Brewer, a suburb of Bangor. The only thing missing was wifi, which I found half a mile down the street.

The heat became very oppressive but we found a lovely shady green spot in the middle of Bangor beside the cooling Penobscot River where we put out our lounge chairs and whiled away the steamy afternoon. Caesar loved sprawling his legs out so his warm belly came in contact with the cool grass while he watched the passing parade of dogs. The Sea Dog Brewery happened to be right beside our little glade and as it was too hot to leave Caesar in the car or the motorhome, Fernie asked them to do a box lunch for us, which Caesar shared.

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It was a forty-mile drive down to Bar Harbour (pronounced Baa Haabuh by the locals) and being Sunday, the roads were busy. As we pulled into the town square, it seemed so familiar and I suddenly remembered our last visit there in the late 1980’s. So many times, I had pictured the square in my mind and could never place it. It’s a town that begs to be strolled. Caesar’s leg was so much better that he managed to walk on the leash with only an occasional carry. The shops are delightful and they all welcome dogs inside – how can you not love ‘Baa Haabuh’?

There’s a lot of wealth in the area; it was originally the haunt of the Rockefellers. Most of Acadia National Park, adjacent to Bar Harbour was donated to the federal government by the Rockefeller family. It’s riddled with carriage roads where motorized vehicles are verboten, built by the prestigious family with the assistance of the Edsel Ford family. They were used as riding trails in the early part of the 20th century.

The magnificent ocean vistas were a bit ‘been there/done that’ to us. Newfoundland and the Maritimes had jaded us; in Newfoundland, we seemingly had it all to ourselves while in Maine we were surrounded by the hoi-poloi in their tour buses, cars and motorcycles. But the day was an agreeable success in spite of a bit of sunburn, a bunch of new insect bites and total exhaustion.

A restaurant across the road from out WM home offered two 1-pound lobsters for $29.95. That was too hard to resist but we were astonished to find that it was a single dinner. Who could eat two pounds of lobster? We shared it and it was more than sufficient and as tasty as ever. I’m going to get awfully tired of lobster soon……….yeah, sure!

I took a drive down to my wifi spot later that evening eager to publish the last instalment of my Cross Canada blog. As I uploaded the photos, the sun was setting and out came the hordes of mosquitoes like an army brigade intent on blood. The windows of my car were all rolled down inviting in the whole damned platoon and they attacked me en masse. I shut my computer in panic and drove wildly off slapping and screaming, the car careening as the little demons took chunks out of my flesh. I screeched to a stop by Maggie, grabbed my equipment and ran full pelt for the door. I slammed the screen door behind me but some of the vicious bloodsuckers managed to sneak in, so we went on a hunt with our swatters, enjoying the kill like big game hunters. How despicable that I could be driven to sink so low. The window screens were dark with thousands more trying to get in – it was like a horror movie. Fernie smirkingly said “And you want to go to Alaska?”

We decided to follow one of the roads described in “America’s Two Lane Highways”, a book that details all the little-known sites and sights away from the interstates. Highway 2 winds through the mountains of South Central Maine past lovely resorts tainted by ugly mill towns spewing smoke and pollution into the once pure air. A constant haze coats the hills and our throats constricted with the choking spew.

At Bethel, not far from the New Hampshire border, we discovered a Passport America campground, Bethel Outdoor Adventures, which offered full three-way hook-up with cable TV and FREE WIFI! YEAH! For $13.50. We ended up spending two nights enjoying pounding showers instead of the quickie Navy showers, catching up our laundry and spending innumerable hours online – Fernie playing poker quite successfully. It had been a long time since we’d just vegged out and we revelled in it.