Downeast

If you've been following my travelogues, you know that what has precipitated some of these trips around Maine is that we (Shelly and I) picked up a State Park Passport, a little booklet that has the State Parks divided by regions of the State with a place to get each park stamped when you visit.  You may also know that Shelly loves lighthouses...in fact, has a tattoo on her foot of the West Quoddy Light, even though she'd never seen it in person.
Well, there are five State Parks in what is referred to as Downeast Maine.  So we decided to make a weekend of collecting those five and visit some lighthouses and Campobello (you've heard of Campobello, right?)  So we packed our real passports, made reservations at a B&B in Lubec for Saturday night and headed out.
I'll start at the end first:  On the way home Sunday we had planned on visiting the last two State Parks near Machias and taking a quick detour to Prospect Harbor and Winter Harbor to see another lighthouse.  Well, there's also a lighthouse on a little island just offshore in Cutler.  So I decided to take the scenic route to Machias via Cutler to see if we might be able to see that lighthouse from the shore.  Unfortunately, I ran over something that cut a tire, which cut the rest of our weekend off right there.  So we'll have to go back down there again.  No bigs since Shel would like to go whale watching anyway.
So I'm just going to write a quick outline of our tour and post a shitload of pictures in the order they were taken.  Our first stop was at Cobscook State Park in Dennysville on the western shore of Cobscook Bay.  Nice spot for camping and I took a couple pictures there...nothing too spectacular.  Then on to Shackford Head State Park in Eastport.  We hiked a half mile to the head and took a few pictures with a nice shot of Lubec across the bay.  Eastport and Lubec are about three miles apart as the crow flies across the bay but 35 miles apart by car.  I took a few pictures in Eastport and we had lunch at The Happy Crab...the best lobster rolls ever.
Then back around the loop through Dennysville to get to Lubec and cross the international bridge onto Campobello Island, New Brunswick.  There's a lighthouse, Mulholland Light, just on the other side of the bridge where you can look back at the village of Lubec across the channel.  There's also a little lighthouse right in the channel, the Lubec Channel Light aka The Sparkplug.  It's a caisson style lighthouse and you'll see a couple of distant pictures of it.
We hustled to the other end of the island because to get to see East Quoddy Headlight aka East Harbour Light, you need to go at low tide because at high tide it sits on an island and you can't walk to it.  This is the Bay of Fundy, where tides change by 20 feet.  You'll see from the pictures what an excursion it was to get to what is arguably the prettiest lighthouse you'll ever see.  You'll see pictures not only of the lighthouse but also of all the ladders, staircases, bridge and rocks you have to navigate.  Every picture of a staircase is a different staircase.
Then we headed back toward Lubec, stopping for a tour of FDR's family summer "cottage."  Lots of history there and well worth a trip.  We then checked into our B&B and went to the village to find some grub. 
The next morning we went to West Quoddy Lighthouse and walked a trail along the cliff shore.  You'll get a good perspective of the rocky coast of Maine and you can see the Island of Grand Manan, NB in the background.  (Maybe another trip?)  You already know what happened after that.  I hope you enjoy these pictures.  Make sure you click into them to really appreciate how beautiful this area at the easternmost area of the United States really is.
You'll have to click the following page break to get to the pictures.

I hope you like lighthouses

I hope you like lighthouses because this post will be pictures of lighthouses that we visited last year, and also because we're going on a little road trip next weekend to the easternmost points in the US and crossing over into Canada to see Campobello.  But you'll have to wait for that until next weekend.

I threw one in of the ferry that took us from Lincolnville on a 15 minute ride to the island of Isleboro, where the first thing you see upon arrival is the above lighthouse.
This is an island that's in the mouth of Penobscot Bay and apparently where John Travolta has a house.

This is Brown's Head Light on the Island of Vinalhaven.  It's owned by the town and is the residence for the Town Manager.  That land you see in the background is the island of North Haven.  Some day I'll take the ferry there.

These four pictures are of the Bass Harbor Light on the southern tip of Mount Desert Island, where Acadia National Park sits.  Shel and I were there last spring, I think.

Click on the picture of look between the trees.

These are of the lighthouse at Owl's Head near Rockland or taken from inside the lighthouse looking, one, back toward Rockland and, two, out towards Vinalhaven.

Taken of the Rockland Breakwater Light from the ferry on my way out to Vinalhaven.  You could also walk the breakwater to get to this.
And these last few are taken of the Fort Point Light and bell tower in Stockton Springs last summer, with a Shelly cameo, of course.

Oops, and a Zeb finger cameo

Just sharing some pics around Maine

So looking at the last blog post before Portsmouth and looking at what pictures there are on my phone since, I see a few you might like from little day trips last summer and fall, and a couple thrown in that I've taken while working.
I get to see some tremendous sights while working but I won't take pictures of views from someone's backyard, even if they're never around, which I'm sure you can understand.  I'll describe each of these and where they are.

This is  a work photo.  Taken from Vinalhaven, an island, looking down the Fox Thoroughfare, which runs between Vinalhaven and the island of North Haven.  This tiny lighthouse just sits on a rock.  It can be rented for the weekend.

Speaking of Vinalhaven, how about a lobstah trap Christmas tree near the ferry landing.

Again, from Vinalhave, two pics taken of a tiny little private cove on a remote section of the island.

Taken at the Sunken Bridge and reversing falls area of Blue Hill.  That's Shelly.

The Deer Isle/Stonington Bridge, taken from the Deer Isle side.  The other side is Sedgwick.  So you'd think it'd be called the Sedgwick/Deer Isle Bridge, but it's a bridge to the island of Deer Isle, which has two towns -- Deer Isle and Stonington.

Finally, for now (I've got enough to do another just of lighthouse pics), more in Central Maine.  These four were taken around Skowhegan and the Kennebec River, including the wire walking bridge, the "famous Indian", the truly famous old Lakewood Theater with a Shelly cameo.

Portsmouth NH

Sorry that I haven't been using this and will try to go back and do some posts filling in some of our other travels since the last post.
As you may have seen on BoSox Tavern, Shel and I finished our weekend with a Sox game at Fenway.  You can read about that part of the trip on that blog post.  The trip idea did begin with me deciding and buying Sox tickets but then we decided, since neither of us had spent anytime in Portsmouth -- a quaint little city we'd heard plenty about -- that we'd take a day off from work, drive down that far and spend the day and night before going to Fenway.
If you get the chance, do yourself a favor and spend a day in Portsmouth.  It is a quaint, beautiful little city that has retained much of its history, from so many houses and downtown buildings built over the centuries, to Strawberry Banke, a living history city block.
There are a couple dozen buildings in Strawberry Banke with character actors in many, showing how life would've been there (the original name of Portsmouth) over the last few centuries.
Another piece of history is the Memorial Bridge, where we were lucky enough to see it in action from the city park.

We started our visit with a detour to see the lighthouse in Newcastle (she loves lighthouses), which sits inside a Coast Guard station that was part of an old fort protecting the area.  This is where most, if not all of my photos were taken.  We finished our sightseeing day with a fabulous dinner at a Latin American/Spanish fusion restaurant called Brazo and a wonderful rest at a boutique hotel made from an old downtown mansion called The Hotel Portsmouth.
Hope you enjoy the pictures.

took this one from one part of the old fort

you can see part of the old fort in the foreground

Look closely, that little knob just left of the lighthouse is another small one way in the distance on an island

Shel by a sign describing one of the oldest houses in NH

Memorial Bridge

Looking back across the Piscataqua River, across an island and you can see the Navy Yard and the old naval prison

Happy birthday to me

Spent a nice day with my sweetie doing a little sightseeing, checking another park off our State Park Passport and getting beat at putt putt golf (by just one stroke).  Now watching some Nascar and relaxing.  Hope you have a great August 18 also and enjoy the pictures.

Old Fort Halifax in Winslow

Bridge plate and look at the Sebasticook River as it meets the Kennebec River

Train tressel across the Sebasticook

Fort Halifax from the train tressel

Across the Kennebec to the old Hathaway shirt factory

Closer shot with the Waterville/Winslow bridge on the right.  Can also see the rapids and another train tressel

Bangor and Augusta

This is really just a place to share some photos but to also share a little love for the 3rd and 4th biggest (using that term loosely) cities in Maine.  So just a little background:  After coming back from our great weekend in Providence, Shel and I wanted to go out to a nice restaurant in Bangor and WE FOUND ONE, a New American Cuisine place on lower Hammond Street called Fiddleheads.  You may have seen my shares on FB and Foursquare, so I won't repeat it but the food was first rate, as good as found in a much bigger city; and the staff was wonderful.
Before our reservations we took a couple hours to walk Downtown Bangor, which I'm quite familiar with having worked there a lot but Shel had not really been.

Hannibal Hamlin statue

Public Enemy #1

I don't have any so-called skyline pictures but I did notice on Friday coming back home from Surry, driving up 1A and then 395, crossing the bridge on 395 between Brewer and Bangor that if you could get up there, you could get an awesome picture of the Penobscot River in front of the Bangor skyline.  There's got to be another place.  That would be a great panorama picture, which will be my segue to share yesterday's time in Downtown Augusta.
Yesterday we went to dinner at the Riverfront BBQ in Augusta, which has a great bar upstairs called the Gin Mill.  We ate upstairs, had a drink with the owner and enjoyed ourselves immensely.  Before we got to the restaurant I took a few pics of downtown, two of them with my new panorama app, which will explain the awkward nature of those pics.

Key Bank bldg. from one block above Water St

Kennebec River bridge from downtown

Old Federal building

There's a block of downtown behind this picture.  That's the Key Bank building again on the distant left and there's another half dozen blocks of downtown beyond.  The entrance to the restaurant is that glass area that goes all the way to the sidewalk in the left foreground.  A great spot for a skyline shot of Augusta would be from that bridge and that one, unlike 395, has a sidewalk.  Hmmmm.

PS  I actually took a picture yesterday from that 395 bridge over the Penobscot River between Bangor and Brewer looking toward the Bangor skyline but it didn't come out well.  Maybe because I was driving (shhhh), maybe because downtown is at least a half mile from this bridge and also due in part because of Todd's nose smudges on the passenger window.  I'll try again.  It would make a nice picture if it could be gotten.

Texas with the boys

As many of you know, a very good friend and his family moved from NH to TX a year ago.  This late winter he sent an email to four of us asking that since the Red Sox would be in Arlington the first weekend in May, how would we feel about coming down for that weekend.  All four of us immediately said we were in.
There's a fair bit to tell but I don't want to bore y'all, so I'll try to summarize the highlights as briefly as possible.  I need to start out by telling you that I personally had not flown since returning home from SoCal in 1988, partly due to my love of roadtrips and in equal measure since they banned smoking on airplanes but I wasn't going to miss this get-together and I couldn't roadtrip it with my limited time off in my "new" job.  It's not that you have to go without a smoke for a 5 hour trip; it's that you need to add in the time to get through security before boarding and add in the layover since the vast majority of airports these days don't have a smoking area.  So Ell and I get to Portland on time, get through security pretty smoothly (though he forgot he had a saline bottle in his bag LOL) and were off to wait to board the flight to Chicago.  Well, we noticed one big band of nasty weather in the Midwest and soon heard that our flight was delayed, followed shortly by the announcement that we wouldn't make our connecting flight in Chicago to Dallas (nice way to help the smoker deal with his addiction!)  So we got on the plane and were told they'd take our info and get us rerouted.  When we landed in Chicago (a nonsmoking airport), folks lined up to try to get info about our leg to Dallas but we noticed that the screens were saying that flight hadn't left yet and we had plenty of time to get on it.  So we made the decision to hustle way over to where that flight was board and made it in plenty of time.  Luckily for us they had never taken us off that flight.  End of airport and smoking stories...suffice to say I'm proud of how well I handled it.
We arrived in Dallas around the same time that TJS did and soon found AA and my brother who were there to pick us up.  We proceeded to Ranch AA, after a short stop at Tom Thumb for critical supplies, where we commenced to catch up, drink and eat lots of cow and pig.  AA grilled us some awesome burgers for a late lunch and we then awaited the brisket and pulled pork he'd been smoking all day.  Man, was it worth the wait.  Forgot to mention that we flew on Friday and the game was scheduled for Saturday night.
Saturday we had a relaxing morning and then struck out for Grapevine to eat some real Texas chili at a place AA was familiar with (hopefully the name will come to me as I write.)  Grapevine is a tourist town, for lack of a better description, a town that's maintained it's old Texas downtown look and is littered with little artist shops and restaurants.  Stevie Ray Vaughn played at the chili place when he was still a teen.  I can't begin to tell you how good that chili was.  "Real Texas chili" doesn't have any tomato base or beans, though beans are an option.  It's just meat and spices.  Good time to share a few pics I took in Grapevine.  Tolbert's!

TJS searching for espresso

The next leg of our journey was on to the ballgame, Red Sox at Rangers at the Ballpark in Arlington.  I've already written about that on BoSox Tavern.  So I won't bore you with that again.  If you haven't read that, you go do so through this link where you'll find a write-up and pictures.  What you won't see in that piece is that after watching the Bruins/Leafs game on the DVR and all the sissies had gone to bed, AA and I stayed up all night drinking, talking movies and watching "Django Unchained," which I enjoyed more than I thought I would.
Now on to Sunday, our last day there since we were all flying out Monday morning.  Our tee times at Champions Golf Club in Justin were for 9:00, which came really early for yours truly who got only a little over an hours sleep thanks to the above-mentioned night in AA's House of Pain.  I had been dreading the golf to some extent because I don't play nearly often enough to play well enough to enjoy it.  Well, I'm very glad I went.  The course was pretty forgiving and I played well enough to have a very good time.  Bro, myself and Ell played in a threesome and TJS and AA played with a couple of AA's new friends in a foursome right behind us.  I'd share my scorecard but I didn't play THAT well.  After an adult beverage at the 19th hole, we went back to AA's to relax for a bit before we struck out on the final leg of an awesome weekend.
We had reservations for 6:00 at the famous H3 Ranch Steakhouse in the old Stockyard area of Fort Worth but we left early enough to look around the stockyard area and have a drink at the historic White Elephant Saloon, where I took a picture and bought a cool-looking t-shirt.  I'll let you decide whether to click the links to learn more about these cool places.

But it's the first time I've smoked inside a public place in many years -- had to have one just for old time's sake -- and we learned about the history of the saloon and took in lots of eye candy.  Then it was on to H3, where we actually ended up eating in the saloon side called Booger Red's, where you'll see a much better picture of the place than the one I took.  At the link you can better see the critters on the wall.  I'll tell you, we ate lots and lots of cow at H3, yours truly and one other having rib-eye and the others porterhouse.  Throw on top of that a couple of awesome appetizers and goblets of grog and we left well satiated.

With full bellies and having run almost nonstop for 3 days, we were mostly too pooped to do much more than go back to AA's, get to bed and get up early to catch our flights out.  I can tell you that we'll have to do this again real soon...maybe Bruins at Stars this time?