The Maine Thing - Part I

Long ago in ages past, before the New House Blog, before Becky-and-Bish, before Satchmo, when it was just Bish, and this was his only blog, and he would blog about whatever he felt like blogging about (see this post for an entertaining account of a bear encounter), whenever the mood struck him, and this is one of those non-new-house-related posts.  This is an account of our recent trip to Maine, USA.  The original motivation for the trip was the wedding of one of Becky's friends.  Since Maine is on the opposite coast from Becky and Bish (hereafter referred to as BB), we decided to take a vacation and stay for about a week.  After all, who wants to fly all the way across a country for a wedding and turn around and come back the next day?  This write-up will be divided into two blog posts - the first (this one) deals with some of the Things We Learned in no particular order, and the second (the next one) deals with Highlights from the trip in mostly chronological order.  Additionally, you will find a few pictures scattered throughout these posts, and in Part II you will find the link to the Picasa album with the rest of the pictures from our trip (except for those that aren't yet developed - more on that later).  Please keep in mind that while some/all of you may already know some/all of the things we learned, these things were new discoveries for at least one of us.

Things We Learned

Jason Bourn's true name is David Webb.  I'm kidding, of course - I already knew this, but I did get through another Jason Bourne book on this trip, and it was a much better read than the previous Jason Bourne book I read.

Flying First Class on long flights is worth the extra money.  Big seats, free checked bags,  real food and beverage service, free cheap headphones.  On our first flight out of San Jose International Airport we were stuck on the ground for almost two hours while the ground crew tried to figure out seating issues (they had sent the wrong plane from Atlanta), and we were given food and beverages while we waited.  It was nice.  We had real meals served on real glass/ceramic bowls/plates, with real metal eating utensils.  Flying east was overnight, so we slept and didn't really eat anything until breakfast.  Flying back west I had three helpings of the tiramisu - two of my own and one of Becky's.  Here's a picture of one of our meals.

Lobster is plentiful in Maine.  Everywhere you go you see signs for lobster.  We could probably have had lobster for every meal, had we so desired.

The Wyoming was the largest wooden sailing vessel to ever sail.  It wasn't the largest wooden sailing vessel every built, though - there was one larger wooden sailing vessel built, but it caught fire before it ever had a chance to sail.

The first Zumwalt class destroyer, the USS Zumwalt, is being built at the Bath Iron Works.  This is the first of a new breed of destroyers for the US Navy.  Sadly, according to Wikipedia, only two more of this class are scheduled to be built.

The Canadian highway system needs improvement.  In America it's usually pretty easy to get off the freeway and get back on again in the other direction if you miss an exit or need to go back for something.  Not so in Canada, at least in Eastern Canada.  An example - just outside of St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, I accidentally left my camera at the visitor center and we had to go back to get it.  Finding an exit was hard enough, but trying to get back on the freeway in the right direction was an exercise in frustration.  We eventually got back to the visitor center and I retrieved my camera, but it cost us a lot of extra, wasted miles and a lot of time and frustration.  Also, the Canadians apparently do not believe in rest stops, and they like to put food and gas and cities as far from the freeways as possible.

Driving toward St. John, New Brunswick, Canada

There's some really good ice cream to be had in Maine.  And we're not talkin' Baskin Robbins, or any other chain.

You can get some good barbecue chicken in New Brunswick.  You can get some good fried catfish, too.

Although they are advertised freely on signs along the freeways, moose apparently don't want to be seen.  The Main countryside seems like prime moose-sighting country, but no moose showed themselves.  No Sasquatches appeared for us, either.

Canadian retailers actually close up shop on Labor Day.  We were surprised to learn this, since Labor Day is a big shopping day in the USA.  If we had known ahead of time we might have chosen a different day to drive to St. John.  We did manage to find one small shopping center open, and restaurants were open.

At Longhorn Steakhouse the cheddar-stuffed filet is not stuffed in-house - it arrives at the restaurant already stuffed.  We found this out when I tried to order it and the waitress informed us that they were out.  I naturally asked which element they were out of and she told us that it comes to the restaurant pre-stuffed.

The current generation of Nissan Altima is a nice little car.  The interior is roomy and has nice materials, it looks nice, the controls seem to be appropriately placed, it seems to get decent mileage, and it seems to have sufficient get-up-and-go for most daily driving.  The trunk is rather small, however.

The Movie, Battleship, wasn't as terrible as it could have been.  No, we didn't fly all the way to Maine just to go to the movies.  This was the inflight movie our westbound flight back to California.  It wasn't great, but it was a somewhat entertaining, somewhat action-packed movie.  Not one I'd pay to see, but a good way to pass the time while flying.

It's still a good idea to carry old-fashioned paper maps on long trips.  The technology is not yet quite there to be able to rely 100% on cell phones or moble wifi hotspots for navigation.  It's close, but not quite where we would like it to be, yet.

The GPS unit in Hertz rental cars is next to useless, and it can be quite annoying.  I won't mention the brand of GPS unit, as some of you reading this may use the same brand and may be quite satisfied.  My first gripe is that the unit comes on every time you start the car, and it also resets the volume to its very loud default setting every time you start the car.  The second gripe is that it is difficult to enter a destination into the unit.  The third gripe is that it couldn't find Bath, ME.  It could find a town nearby, however, and the one time I decided to try it out I used that town as my destination (when we were driving back to Bath from St. John).  The fourth gripe is that my phone can plot a better route than that particular GPS unit.  The unit wanted us to take a longer, more circuitous rout back to Bath, and every time we passed an exit it would tell us to take the next exit so we could turn around, go all the way back to St. John, and take its prescribed rout.  Eventually it gave up on that and kept telling us to make a u-turn right on the freeway so we could go back and take its mapped route.  After several hours it finally realized that we weren't going to take its route and it re-plotted a route more in-line with the actual route we took.  On the other hand, it was pretty entertaining to see the unit persisting in its desire for us to take its plotted route.

Weather forecasting is still not 100% accurate.  This was disappointing to us.  We had scheduled an all-day kayaking excursion with a local kayak-excursion company.  This excursion was scheduled for the Wednesday before our return to California.  On Monday the weather services were all predicting strong rains and storms for Wednesday.  On Tuesday the docent at the Maine Maritime Museum was predicting storms and gales for Wednesday.  On Tuesday afternoon we called the kayak-excursion people and they said we'd have to see what the weather was like on Wednesday morning.  They called us on Wednesday morning and warned us that it was too dangerous to go out and we should cancel our excursion.  Thus the disappointment.  What made it worse is that they weather forecasts were WRONG.  We drove down to Boothbay Harbor, where the kayak-excursion people were, just to explore the area, and it turned out to be a very nice day.  The rain and wind died down very early and it was calm and sunny.  We totally could have gone on a kayak excursion.  We were not the only ones, however, affected by the faulty weather predictions - we noticed notices on several tour boats that the day's tours were cancelled due to the rough weather.

Boothbay Harbor.  Calm and clear.

The kayak-excursion place.  Look at that calm water.

Conclusion of Part I

And now for the conclusion to Part I.  In the introduction I mentioned some undeveloped pictures.  While it's true that both Bish and Becky have made the transition to digital photography, we have only been able to find single-use waterproof cameras that use 35mm film - we have never seen one that is digital.  We bought two of these waterproof cameras for use on our cancelled kayak excursion.  I had opened one, and I figured that since I had it opened I was going to use it, and I was going to take at least one picture underwater since we had a waterproof camera.  These are the undeveloped pictures mentioned in the introduction.  I did indeed get a few underwater pictures by dipping the camera in the ocean at Popham State Park Beach.  I also used it to take some above-water pictures.

Stay tuned for Part II, coming soon, which will cover some of the highlights of the trip, in roughly chronological order.  Part II will also contain the link to our Picasa album from this trip.

You want some lobster with that?
       bIsh