Maine Event - Day Six

Today was the biggest and brightest yet of our wonderful stay here. We started off with a quick trip to Dunkin Donuts, which is a requirement to make any trip to New England complete. We were bringing our glazed portions back to the house, and my anticipation of consuming the sugary delight was so pervading my thoughts that I missed a turn. I decided to drive on just a bit as I knew that the road would end soon near Maine Yankee, the decommissioned nuclear power plant. And without much fanfare, that's just what it did, so we did a one-eighty. As we sported along we spotted a whitetail deer in the general area of right in the middle of the freaking road. The brakes were hit--nothing too extreme as there was no iminent danger. The deer completed its road-crossing endeavor, and as we continued on slowly I noted that the deer was apparently just as interested in us as we were in it. It was standing a few yards out in the woods and gazing back as if we had a carload of donuts or something. So I backed up, got out, unloaded the toddler, and provided her with an eyeful of the local fauna. I got back in the car, told Leigh to put Emily's donuts back in her bag, and we proceeded as planned to the house and completed Project Donut. Now one may think that the day can't get much better than donuts, deer, and spent nuclear fuel safely encased in concrete, but I assure you, reader, that it does. Here are a few words to serve as teasers so that you don't stop reading: sunshine, boat, ice cream, carousel, ferris wheel, seal, pizza, and traffic jam. After the donuts (and in Leigh's case, a bagel, because she's just that healthy) were satisfactorily lodged in our bellies we struck out for Bath, which is famous for shipbuilding. We went to the Maritime Museum and it was quite nice. It even had a pirate ship playground for Emily to shake her wiggles out. The largest wooden ship to ever haul cargo was built here, as well as JP Morgan's yacht, and, like, a bunch of other boats. Right next to the ticket booth was the most beautiful rowboat you can imagine--it was built by local eighth graders! They have a program that let's kids come to the boat shop once a week to work on a project, and they turn out some amazing flotsam. As we were wrapping up our visit to the museum, the sun came out. This is the first sunshine that we've seen on the trip! Since this is a particularly festive weekend throughout this great land, the good people of Bath had lured a carnival operator to set up camp in the mud below US 1. This, of course, is where we headed after dining at the local McDonald's. I rode on the caurosel with Em, and Leigh went on the ferris wheel with her. We had a speck of ice cream (not from the carnival vendors) and hit the road. Emily, due to it being prime nap time, having her belly full of ice cream, and the unparallelled driving skill of her father, fell asleep. I apologize for all of the pictures, but it was a busy day. And now I'm at the point where I have to add a couple more pictures because I promised them in a previous post. Since we were hoping that Emily might fall asleep in the car, we took a bit of a drive to Westport Island again to get pictures of a place we just found quite amazing. The first picture below is the view from someone's FRONT YARD! The second is their BACK YARD! Can you imagine? They live on a piece of land that juts out into the water, and since it is low-lying land, it was filled in and used as a crossing. A culvert under the road allows the tide to do its thing. As the sunniness waxed and the cloudiness waned (simultaneously, I might add), our spirits were lifted and we decided to go for it! We then proceeded to discuss exactly what "it" was. We decided to brave the US 1 traffic jam winding its way through Wiscasset, and once again we headed for Boothbay Harbor--if it's sunny, we're taking our precious little Emily on a boat ride, by golly! We were hoping to get the 4:00 lobstering and seal tour, but there wasn't one. Evidently it was just too difficult to erase that time from the dry erase board. So we settled for the 5:10 harbor cruise. Due to having to wait for over an hour before 5:10 rolled around, we desparately struggled to amuse ourselves. By the time we put out to sea, the temperature had dropped and the fog had rolled in, so it was a chilly excursion. We did see a large sailboat coming in, a lighthouse, and my eagle eyes spotted a seal swimming a few yards off of port (as per the protocol handed down through the seafaring generations, I blurted, "SEAL, SEALl!" so that everyone else could see). Emily really enjoyed the ride, which included a stop at Squirrel Island as the boat also serves as a ferry. We polished off the afternoon with a spot-hitting pizza and sailed back to HQ to write up the day's events and get some rest. There are parades and fireworks in store for tomorrow!