{"id":1529,"date":"2015-06-19T22:00:39","date_gmt":"2015-06-19T22:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/?p=1529"},"modified":"2018-09-08T01:34:30","modified_gmt":"2018-09-08T01:34:30","slug":"friday-june-19th-bar-harbor-to-calais-220-miles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/06\/19\/friday-june-19th-bar-harbor-to-calais-220-miles\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday June 19th (Bar Harbor to Calais, 220 miles)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Today started out with a breakfast at the 2 Cats in Bar Harbor, a restaurant
\nwe really wanted to try out. It had a wonderful banana-pecan pancake and
\nlovely fruit, but sadly, I had an upset stomach and wasn’t up for much in
\nterms of food. We did buy two of their diner mugs because we liked the name\u00a0and logo so much\u2014but were told by the waitress that the actual cats live at\u00a0the owners’ house next door. Then we left BH behind, after four wonderful\u00a0days there, and headed northeast. The drive wasn’t that much fun because it\u00a0was raining for most of the way along the coast to Lubec, ME, the\u00a0easternmost town in the US. We went to see the Easternmost lighthouse in\u00a0the US just as it stopped raining, and I was satisfied\u2014like the other ones
\nwe’ve seen, it wasn’t tall, but at least it was red-and-white striped! And
\nit had a Fresnel lens, not some modern substitute.<\/p>\n

From Lubec, where we barely stopped, there is a bridge to an island called
\nCampobello, which is already part of Canada, and Richard had tipped us off
\nand told us to go there: it has an International (Canada\/US) Park because
\nFDR’s summer vacation residence (\u201ccottage\u201d with 17 bedrooms) in the teens\u00a0and 1920s is on Campobello. So we got our passports out and took a look\u00a0(beautifully restored cottage, and not as ostentatious as it sounds, with
\npretty small, simple rooms\u2014but obviously, one traveled with an entourage of\u00a0servants to take care of everything). Not knowing that much about
\npresidents’ biographies, I hadn’t known that he had five kids, and had a
\ngood time with the pictures that featured the only daughter, Anna, looking
\nvery grumpy as a teenager. I also hadn’t known or remembered that he
\ncontracted polio right on this island during his summer vacation. We then
\nexplored the rest of the island, which is about ten kilometers long and
\npretty narrow, and had a ho-hum meal at a restaurant by the public golf
\ncourse\u2014-chicken noodle soup sounded just right since I still felt \u201coff.\u201d
\nThen we drove to the very end, to another lighthouse, with the sun just
\nstarting to come through. It’s a cool island on a little cliffy island that
\ncan only be reached when the tide is low\u2014which it wasn’t at the time.
\nCampobello has about 900 people year round, 1100 in the season (which again\u00a0has barely started here), and who knows how many day visitors. The only\u00a0thing that made noticeable that we were in Canada is that a lot of flags
\nwere flowing and that the signs were bilingual, but everything was really
\nabsolutely the same as on the Maine coast\u2014even the accents, unsurprisingly,\u00a0which were just as heavy in this part of Maine, and don’t sound either\u00a0\u201cCanadian\u201d or \u201cEast Coast,\u201d so I would really have to study them to figure\u00a0out what’s distinctive.<\/p>\n

We then drove further along the coast, now in sunny weather, to get to
\nCalais, again directly on the Canadian border, but frustratingly pronounced
\n\u201cCalless,\u201d which my brain just refuses to do, even as I could handle
\nLoo-beck for Luebeck, which is clearly the naming inspiration for Lubec! We\u00a0stopped on the way, though, since we found \u201cour\u201d perfect motel, The
\nRedclyffe Motel, in a teeny non-town named Robbinston. It’s just classic
\ndrive-up-to-the-room motel rooms, but the affiliated restaurant (which we\u00a0didn’t try) was a run-down Victorian complete with gingerbread cutouts, with\u00a0shabby paint but a brand-new bright-red metal roof, and\u2014that was the\u00a0important thing\u2014the rooms overlook the bay that we are on. They are barely\u00a0open for their season and we are pretty sure we are the first ones in our\u00a0enormous room since last fall\u2014we got a discount because one of the window\u00a0panes has a long crack from last winter’s unusual amount of snow (16 feet at\u00a0one point) bearing down on the roof. I cannot imagine living here in the\u00a0winter, and we saw many, many homes and lots of land for sale, waterfront\u00a0property or not. We checked in around 4:30 or so, and since there was a\u00a0teeny rocky beach within 100 feet, complete with boat dock and public park,\u00a0we rambled around a bit and took in the view. Then we drove the 12 miles to\u00a0Calais and found ourselves a diner with more ho-hum food and looked around a\u00a0little bit. The city is small, with about 3,000 people living there now,\u00a0while in 1870, when the port and the lumber industry were in their prime,\u00a0there were over 6,000. The classic main street area, with former shops and\u00a0banks, was right on the waterfront, still recalls the bustling business, but\u00a0there is barely any tourism here now\u2014there is a big visitor center, but it\u00a0is targeted toward Canadians coming into Maine for locations further south\u00a0and west. The walk along the waterfront was interesting because you could\u00a0see the foundations, and in one case, the wooden structure, of the dock\u00a0buildings that used to be there in the St. Croix River that connects this\u00a0port to the Bay of Fundy. We also found out that the walk, which also got\u00a0us a little bit into a wooded area, underneath the bridge that leads to St. Stephen in Canada on the other side of the river, was the beginning of a\u00a0walk\/bike trail system that leads all the way down to Key West (called the\u00a0East Coast Greenway, although much of it is just roadside biking).<\/p>\n

We then went back to the motel, and decided not to do anything else. For
\none thing, I was still not feeling well and went to bed early, and for
\nanother, it was late by at least one time zone here\u2014our phones keep toggling\u00a0between EST and the next time zone, and since our computers are still on\u00a0Nebraska time, it’s been a little confusing. When Kati called from Mountain\u00a0time in North Platte and wanted us to do something before the end of the\u00a0business day, it got really bizarre because the business day here had been\u00a0over for two hours!<\/p>\n

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  Today started out with a breakfast at the 2 Cats in Bar Harbor, a restaurant we really wanted to try out. It had a wonderful banana-pecan pancake and lovely fruit, but sadly, I had an upset stomach and wasn’t up for much in terms of food. We did buy two of their diner mugs … Continue reading “Friday June 19th (Bar Harbor to Calais, 220 miles)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roadtrip2015"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1529"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1538,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529\/revisions\/1538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}