Maine Part 2

Warning: This blog post contains some of my unedited / sarcastic thoughts.

Hello again! (I think it’s rude to not greet my readers. After all, writing is worthless in my opinion if no one is there to read it.) It’s late at night and finally the motivation has struck me to write some more. I still have serious reservations about posting this, but worst case scenario I can always private it later. On every blog I have commentary that usually gets edited out or stays in my head. This time it’s here for all to read! Hahaha!

Also quick side note… we did socially distance and you might notice that I didn’t wear masks in my pictures. I tried my best to make sure no one was within about 30 ft of me when I did that. I took off the mask for 30 seconds, snapped the picture, and then boom it’s back on like it never happened. If I couldn’t be super far from people I didn’t take the mask off.

Last week I wrote about the epic Maine trip. You can read that here! Well, I think I mentioned that I wasn’t able to see all the places I had wanted to see. So a few weeks ago I made a hasty plan to ‘finish’ the trip. Yes we had seen Acadia, which was the Maine goal, but in my mind not all the locations in the journal were seen so thus the trip wasn’t complete. *hah I included a joke*

Much like all trips with Mom, this trip plan had many revisions. “We can’t possibly see all of those in one day and still have fun!” -direct quote from Mom. I’ll just say that eventually we decided on a 2 day trip plan, which ended out working well.

Day 1

We left at about 10 am on Saturday, October 10th. Usually I prefer leaving super early in the morning, but neither of us were into that sort of plan. Every once and awhile it’s nice to take a more relaxed approach…even if I don’t want to and argue the whole time. It took about 3 hours to get there. We stopped once at a rest stop to refresh. I’m not a big fan of these sort of pitstops because it’s a waste of time. Remember to only eat/drink stuff that dehydrates you so you don’t ever have to stop. About 172 miles later we arrived at Pemaquid Point Lighthouse.

This wasn’t one of the places that I had wanted to see on the Acadia trip. (I didn’t even know it had existed at the time.) It was actually very cool and only cost $3 to get in. You can climb on the rocks overlooking the ocean. Just make sure you are careful not to fall as it would hurt. The rocks aren’t exactly flat so it would be like if you fell hard on a train rail.

There were quite a few boulders that you could climb on to watch the ocean attack the rocky shore. After we toured the rocks we went to look at the lighthouse. I had expected to be able to climb inside the lighthouse because that’s what the google reviews had lead me to believe. Unfortunately the reviews hadn’t mentioned that touring the inside of the lighthouse only happened when there were enough volunteers. It is still quite the place and boasts its own museum, which is free to visit. On our way out we stopped to view potential souvenirs at a nearby market stand. Nothing of interest was there though. On to the next location!

Next we headed to a nearby town for some real souvenirs. It was on the way to the next spot anyways and I ended up finding stuff I really liked. It was only about an hour of travel from the souvenir stores and in almost no time at all we had made it to Bailey Island! I was hoping to see sharks, but sadly no sharks graced me with their presence.

I had my eyes on The Giant’s Stairs since the inception of the Acadia adventure and now I finally had the chance to see them. There were more rocks to climb on except I actually had to be careful on these because the ocean was splashing water all over the place. ~They were slippery~

You can’t see it in the picture, but I’m probably a good 15 feet high on this mini cliff. Sure there is a rock in front of me, but I didn’t dare go closer to the edge or I’d risk falling in. There weren’t that many people here so that meant I could test my courage once again and look like a fool taking a picture of bb8. It’s one thing to do it alone in the wilderness, it’s completely different to do it in front of people.

After all the fun at the Giant’s Stairs it turned out that weeks later I find out I didn’t even see the stairs! *cries* (Just kidding, but I was annoyed). We had seen some other viewpoint, however we hadn’t walked far enough on the trail to see the stairs. With that it shall be left on the map to revisit some other day.

Next we went to the Bailey Island beach. It was just a bit farther down the road. When you think of Maine you might think of a flat border with a relatively straight edge. Nothing could be further from the truth! The coast of Maine is like one thousand tiny peninsulas. I visited the lighthouse early in the day. It’s on one and so is the Bailey Island beach.

The plan was to see the sunset. There were actually a lot of people on the beach. We didn’t stay until the sun hit the horizon because I was afraid of the extreme tension of driving behind slow people on the narrow windy road that lead back to the highway. The sunset was really nice.

Ok so the last part of day one was spent driving to the hotel. Overall a good day. Spent plenty of time ‘in the moment’ as Mom would say. We went to a place called Rosie’s Restaurant and Pub for dinner. I had a burger and fries like usual and I loved them. After dinner Mom showed me the back alleys of Portland. Then we went back to the hotel and we went to bed.

Day 2

Day 2 was shorter. The less things you plan to see the more time you get to see them. Like usual I skipped the hotel breakfast. Mom wasn’t a big fan of it though. The first thing we saw was the Snow Falls Gorge. See I thought it was a pretty legit waterfall. Turns out that’s just not the case.

I had seen this landmark on the top 50 things to do in Maine website. Unfortunately it was too far out of the way on the Acadia trip and we didn’t have time for it. I thought it was an epic waterfall. Lies! If you want to hike down to the falls themselves you need to cross a bridge. It just so happened that on the day I went, the bridge was covered in an inch of water. Not a problem as you can still shuffle across on the sides. I chuckled as we saw one couple just give up and turn around when they saw the water.

Once you cross the bridge you can actually walk down to the very edge of the rocks right before the falls. I wouldn’t advise it because it’s too risky. I’m a risk taker myself and even I thought that was too much. Falling in is basically a guaranteed trip to the hospital, which is 50 miles away.

If you keep walking on the path you get to the apparent start of the waterfall. I suppose you could walk across the rocks in the picture above, but what you can’t see is that you would be playing with the Fates on those slick rocks. Overall I’d say that this was a pretty sweet place to visit if you are in the area, but don’t drive 100 miles to see it like I did. (50 there and back)

The last destination of the trip was the Desert of Maine. I had been badgering Mom about this for ages and she had begrudgingly promised to finally go with me. Just as the name implies there is actually sand in Maine.

There was actually a lot of sand here and I got to walk around a lot. There is also a Pokémon Go gym here and I made the huge mistake of putting one of my Pokémon here. Never take over a gym in the middle of nowhere because you have to wait ages to get your Pokémon back. It took TWELVE DAYS to get my Rhydon back because no one goes to this freakin gym. Grrrrr! Err…I’ll continue.

So my Mom showed some of her coworkers pictures of this cool place and now they all want to see it. To think that she was so uninterested before.

We walked through the forest on a rather peaceful trail. One with nature you might say. That’s hard to believe with a ‘go go go go’ type of guy such as myself, but it’s true! After seeing all that the Desert of Maine had to offer and stocking up on yet more souvenirs we headed home. Overall I saw 99% of the things I had wanted to see and had a great time.

Lastly I’m sorry you had to suffer through this rare form of my writing. Until next time, have a good one!

If you ever see a google maps review with a bb8 picture in it…it’s probably me that took it! 😀