August 27th, Kickapoo, IL
Scenery as we continued East along the Maine coast was wonderful and different. (Wiscasset proclaimed itself, "The Prettiest Town in Maine", and it just might be.)There were fantastical creatures fashioned from odd bits of old farm machinery and all manner of gleaming copper weather vanes for the tourists, and what seemed to me to be an oxymoronic offer, "Lobster Yacht for Sale".
In a tidy red shack outside Ellsworth a young woman sold "pickled wrinkles". It would have taken a stronger soul than I to resist. They turned out to be speckled sea snails in salt water/vinegar brine, not much on taste, but considerably chewy. Never let it be said that I confined my regional food in Maine to effete lobster!
Machias was a treat, with more good food (including lobster - I'm not a total dufus), more wild roses, artwork galore, a comfy bed looking out on the ocean, great walks, talks about times gone by, and killer card games.
I was impressed with the generosity of the First Congregational Church in Machias, where more than a hundred paper grocery bags sat on tables in the basement waiting to be filled with food and handed out later in the week to the needy in the city.
Acadia National Park was nine parts wonderful, and one part soggy. After setting up camp (including putting up the screened room up for the first time), I took the free shuttle service to explore while Peachy rested. There are beaches (warning - cold water!), cliffs where peregrines nest, rocky cliffs with surf pounding away, a wildflower garden, carriage roads, and mighty Cadillac Mountain. The ranger-led walks were fun and educational (I learned a new term: "glacial erratic", a boulder unlike other rocks in the area, which was dumped by a glacier.) A serendipitous extra was a free beading workshop taught by a Native American.
In nearby Bar Harbor there were crowds of "people from away",as my Machias friend termed visitors, wonderful flowers, and an ice cream parlor on every block. Just off the main square is a beautiful old Episcopal church with Tiffany stained glass windows where I attended an evening Taize service. Here was also a coin laundry where clean and dry laundry happened.
The last two stops in Maine included a great seafood lunch overlooking the harbor in Kennebunk, a tour of that charming town (largely obscured by fog), and then a couple of days in nearby Arundel on a family-owned organic farm. Here were handmade houses (one of straw bales), a magnificent food garden, wonderful home-grown food, a veritable Taj Mahal of a hand-tiled shower, and Gus, the ultimate frisbie dog.
Water was present everywhere in Maine, the tremendous and always changing ocean, lakes (many with water lily adornments), tidal flats, and farm ponds of varied size and health. Surely there were aquifers and springs also, even if not so apparent. Yet even here there are stacks of packaged plastic bottles of water in the stores and by the gas pumps. Why? The taste of the tap water as I traveled around did change, and some tasted better than others, but they were all potable, I have yet to plagued by gastric distress, and the thought of all that unnecessary plastic is troublesome, to me, anyway.
ONSET (of what? good or bad?)
From here we really and truly do head West! Shalom
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