Leaf Peeping - Day 1 - Boston to Bar Harbor

On this rainy fall day, D.C. is doing it's best to bring gloom, but the memories of my recent trip to the Northeast US and Québec will not be denied their day in the sun.

I realize that probably not a lot of people would find someone else's vacation interesting.  But I mostly just write about it to process it and to capture the little details that will filter through the sieve of my ever-aging mind after too long.  At least there are pictures.  

So it all started on a beautiful Saturday morning in DC.  My favorite thing about living in Old Town is going for a run along the Potomac River and through the cobblestone alleys of my little corner of the metropolitan sprawl.  After that I threw the rest of my stuff together and booked it to the airport.  I arrived in Boston around 10:30am.  I met up with Christi (of Grenoble fame) with whom this whole trip was planned, and we began our tour.  Christi had just returned from a week in France and the airline had lost her baggage, the saga of this lost baggage would continue for almost the entire week. We rented a car and made our way up the coast of Boston to Maine.  We had thought about stopping in Portland for lunch but after seeing signs for Kennebunk and Kennebunkport, we had to detour.  Arriving was like seeing an LL Bean and Vineyard Vines catalogue explode into real life.  Everyone had beautiful golden retrievers, drove Subaru Outbacks and Limited Edition Ford Explorers in hunter green with tan leather interiors.  

I knew that Kennebunkport sounded familiar to me, not just for being a cute, touristy town  but for some other reason.  Ah yes, right, its BEER.  So we went straight to Federal Jack's Brew Pub which is in Kennebunk and welcomed ourselves to vacation by trying a sampler of their beers.  Then we ate lunch overlooking a little cove of sailboats with the sea breeze blowing our hair in just the right direction.  We walked around the town for a little bit then headed to Kennebunkport.  We just stopped at the rocky beach for a moment and soaked in the first of many beautiful seascapes along this craggy coast.

Our next stop was the Port Clyde lighthouse.  Friday night as I was doing last minute Googling about the vacation, I got it in my head that Forrest Gump had run to a lighthouse in the movie (1:29 mark) when he's running all over America.  It occured to me that this lighthouse was very possibly in Maine.  Sure enough, it is!  It became oddly important to me to stop at this lighthouse.  I decided to broach the subject with Christi and see if I could convince her to stop there. It was slightly out of the way but it had a strange hold on me.  

Fortunately, Christi was all for it and so we drove to Port Clyde, ME and the Marshall Point lighthouse.  It was one of the most picturesque spots on the trip.  So peaceful and beautiful.  

We finally pulled in to Bar Harbor, ME around 7pm that night.  It had been a long drive but we stopped at a great place for dinner and had good food accompanied by a jazz combo.  Our waiter had lived all over and, in the first of many encounters that further solidified this point, older gentlemen are very interested in two single ladies traveling together.  He asked us all kinds of questions and spent too much time at our table to be considered a very good waiter for anyone who wasn't us.  Either way, the food was excellent and it was a warm atmosphere.  Christi and I had an early morning the next day but we had to squeeze in a late night run to Walmart to get picnic supplies for the next day as well as a few necessities for the baggage-challenged traveler.  We were the only people in the store and they were just about to close. I learned that Walmart acts sort of like a control in any experiment.  One of my favorite things about going to grocery stores in different places is to use the grocery store and products that they stock as a sort of experiment in culture.  What is different? How is that a reflection of the place and the people it serves? 

Walmart doesn't deviate too much from the standard, as you can imagine. But you know what you'll find.  And it came up huge for our needs that evening, offering one-stop shopping for clothes and food late at night in a small town where otherwise we would have had to disrupt our travel plans the next day to go shopping when we should be exploring Acadia NP.  

So, I guess, thanks Walmart? File under, things I never thought I'd have occasion to write.