Adventures in Maine: Day 2
Lost and Found in a Seaside Town
In which Karen forgives her iPhone for being large, expensive, slippery, hard to dial with one hand, and generally unphonelike.
Looking at the week's weather forecast for Maine, and finding the temperatures to be not unlike Maryland in the summer, I felt no need to pack pants or long sleeves. Off I gaily went with a bag full of nothing that came down further than my knees.
In which Karen forgives her iPhone for being large, expensive, slippery, hard to dial with one hand, and generally unphonelike.
Looking at the week's weather forecast for Maine, and finding the temperatures to be not unlike Maryland in the summer, I felt no need to pack pants or long sleeves. Off I gaily went with a bag full of nothing that came down further than my knees.
It's cold here at night.
Probably due to the proximity to the sea, the humidity here makes it colder instead of warmer. (Maryland should try that.) The humidity here is visible. When I woke up this morning (at 5:30 because I whacked out my internal clock by getting up at 4:30 yesterday), I could just barely see the neighboring house, only 40 feet away. The low-hanging mist didn't clear until 11am, and then I was amazed to watch it still rolling in over the trees at noon. All the way to Portland, great, tall of masses of mist coming from the shore.
So off I went to Freeport, 25 miles up the coast, home of the flagship LL Bean store. I had heard it was worth seeing. Cape Elizabeth, where I am hanging my hat -- er, computer? -- for the week, is directly on the other side of Portland (the local metropolis) from Freeport, so I was faced with the choice of driving alllll the way west to I-95 on wee little coastal roads, or cutting through Portland. Google said I should cut through Portland, so I did.
Google impolitely tried to send me the wrong way down a one-way road in Portland, but this was in the griddy portion, so I was able to correct by going around a block, and I arrived in Freeport unscathed. Freeport is a walkably petite town full of outlet stores. The LL Bean store is nothing to write home about (which is precisely what I'm doing, so .. hrm), but it does have a large boot made of sand outside.
Freeport also abounds with small boutiques, like Wicked Whoopies, which I felt obliged to photograph for my friend Michael. (It's a bakery -- whoopies are apparently some ghastly marshmallow concoction.)
Homeward Bound
I had cleverly thought at the last minute to print directions home, cities being precocious beasts that don't necessarily allow one to go back the way one came. The reverse directions were different, so I congratulated myself on my foresight.
The trip back through Portland went fairly smoothly until it came time to drive back across Casco Bay. I couldn't find the bloody bridge. My directions purported that it would be a right turn from the road I was driving on, yet I ended up driving around the rim of Casco Bay, looking forlornly out to the bridge on my left which was, I was certain, where I should have been. Combined with its earlier attempt to get me killed on a one-way street, I was also certain that Google Maps was out to get me. I tried turning around, I tried driving on large roads that proclaimed a southerly direction, and eventually I gave up finding my own way. I happened across an exit labeled with a road name that I vaguely recognized as having been a party to my original journey from I-95 to Cape Elizabeth on the way up, so I took it. It delivered me to a mall.
Fortunately, it was a mall of which Google is aware, and I was able to route myself from the mall back to the house using Google Maps. After some initial false starts getting from the parking lot to the spot on the contortional network of nearby roads that Google identified as the starting point, I navigated home. As you know if you've ever had to drive by yourself using the turn-by-turn directions in Google Maps on an iPhone, this is a somewhat tenuous venture. The type is small, the buttons to advance to the next step are somewhat small if you're simultaneously driving and squinting at tiny street signs, and Google Maps has the irritating behavior of zooming way out and then back in between each step. Nevertheless, I am here at the kitchen table in my temporary roost, not lost in the suburban wilderness. iPhone, I forgive you for your imperfections, be they many.
It Was a Dark and Dreary .. Afternoon
At 4:30pm, I was out near I-95, and it was hot and sunny. As I wound toward the coast on the two-lane 45 mph road that brings one eventually to Cape Elizabeth, the clouds of mist that had been rolling in over the trees when I left were still at it. By 5pm when I was driving along the coast, the thick overhead mist had blotted out the sun. I could tell from a general brightness that the sun was still bare, not covered with clouds, but it had completely disappeared from view.
Labels: Maine
This entry was posted
on Sunday, July 6, 2008 at 9:51 PM.
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