East Coast 2021:
Day 5 - Bucksport, ME


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East Coast 2021: [Day 1 - Erie, PA] [Day 2 - Syracuse, NY] [Day 3 - Littleton, NH] [Day 4 - Ft. Kent, ME] [Day 5 - Bucksport, ME] [Day 6 - Hampton, NH] [Day 7 - Branford, CT] [Day 8 - Bensalem, PA] [Day 9 - Jessup, MD] [Day 10 - Petersburg, VA] [Day 11 - Columbia, SC] [Day 12 - Baxley, GA] [Day 13 - Titusville, FL] [Day 14 - Homestead, FL] [Day 15 - Homestead, FL] [Day 16 - Homestead, FL] [Day 17 - Tavernier, FL] [Day 18 - Marathon, FL] [Day 19 - Gainesville, FL] [Day 20 - Natchez, MS] [Day 21 - Nashville, TN] [Day 22 - Heading Home]

Tuesday, September 14, 2021: We started our epic journey just after 7:00 AM. Tom reset the trip odometer to record the number of miles we drove in comparison to the official length of US 1.
Here's the South US 1 sign in Maine.
A few minutes later, we passed St Louis Catholic Church, one of many we saw with an open steeple design.
We stopped at McDonald's for breakfast, and noticed that some of signs on the building were in both English and French. When the border is fully open, there must be enough traffic from nearby Canada to justify it.
This "Welcome to Maine" sign was for all of the visitors from Canada who had just crossed the nearest bridge.
There was evidence of logging on this side of the border to match the sounds of the sawmill that we heard from the Canadian side yesterday.
The Saint-Hilaire parish church on the Canadian side also featured an open steeple design. This one had a domed top with what looked like a platform halfway up.
The St. John River is beautiful.
The Madawaska Bridge is another crossing point to Canada.
Here is the bridge crossing the St. John River at Van Buren, Maine.
In Van Buren, we faced our first splitting of US 1 and its evil twin, usually named 1A along the route. We stayed true to US 1 and followed it inland to Caribou.
After every international bridge, there was a "Welcome to Maine" sign not long after. This one had a slogan at the bottom: "The way life should be."
The clear blue skies helped set the mood for a perfect driving day.
Debbie had brought along an article from her dad's old December 1984 issue of National Geographic magazine that covered the drive down US 1.
Debbie read aloud the National Geographic article about US 1 as we drove, and it pictured one section of the road in Maine just 10 or 15 minutes after we had unknowingly driven on it. It was surreal. We thought about driving back to that section to get a photograph of it nearly 40 years later, but decided not to spend the time backtracking. But it was tempting.
It turns out that a lot of the drive through Maine looks just like the section described in the article. Here's a shot of a similar section of road.
We stayed faithful to US 1 and drove around the perimter of Caribou. Debbie's aunt had lived here while she was in the Air Force, so the area was of interest to us.
The next major town south was Presque Isle, Maine, which was our second Presque Isle of the trip.
We crossed over the Aroostook River, ...
... and saw this giant milk carton celebrating Aroostook's first pasteurizing dairy. Next door, we stopped at a gas station next door without realizing that it was full service. We hadn't even considered that full service was still a thing in Maine, but we would check closely before stopping at any other gas stations on the trip.
Roadside America had alerted us to a scale model of the solar system that was along US 1 starting at the University of Maine - Presque Isle. We drove around the campus looking for the model of the Sun, but it must have been in one of the buildings.
The scale was 1 mile = 93,000,000 miles. A very short time later we drove past the model for Venus. We must have missed the Mercury model when we left campus, which wasn't surprising since it would be about the size of a marble at this scale.
The Earth and moon were on poles on the other side of the road and surprisingly hard to photograph. The moon model was extremely tiny.
We missed Mars, but we saw Jupiter a long time before we got to it. It had a nice parking area near it as well, which was really nice. The four Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) were also present.
Saturn and its moon Titan were easily seen four miles down the road.
At the base of the model was an interpretive sign explaining why the model was here, and where the various planets were located along the road. When the models were placed between 2000 and 2003, there were still nine planets in our solar system (sorry, Pluto). The sign confirmed that the Sun model was inside Folsom Hall at the University of Maine - Presque Isle, and it also let us know that the Pluto model was inside the visitor center in Houlton.
Ten miles down the road was Uranus, ...
... and 11 miles further was Neptune.
We stopped in the Houlton Visitors Center to see the Pluto model, which was the size of a superball. Pluto's moon Charon was also present, as well as a framed article that eagerly anticipated the arrival of the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.
Here's a close-up of the Pluto and Charon models. We had a great time looking for the models along the road. What a great way to pass the time.
We stopped at the Million Dollar View Scenic Overlook, which had fantastic views of the Chiputneticook chain of lakes, including North and East Grand Lakes, Mud Lake, Spednic Lake, Palfrey Lake, Brackett Lake, and Deering Lake. There were huge boulders visible that had been deposited by glaciers during the ice age 25,000 years ago.
More pretty scenery.
We were in a scenic area of Maine known as DownEast and Acadia. "DownEast" was the direction ships travelled from New York and Boston to reach Maine: downwind and east. It is described as a particularly scenic and beautiful area of Maine, specfically along the coast.
We passed many wild turkeys by the side of the road, and this is the first group that we managed to photograph.
They ran away as we slowed down to get a better look, but look at the waddle on this guy being backlit by the sun.
Lewy Lake was looking lovely.
Debbie was looking ahead on our route for a place for lunch, and had placed an online order at the Baileyville Big Stop restaurant, which was right on Route 1. However, when we got to the spot marked on Google Maps, there was nothing there. As we had already paid for our food, we had to call the restaurant and ask for directions. We finally arrived at the restaurant more than four miles down the road from where Google thought it was.
While Tom went in to get the food, Debbie enjoyed her view of a rare white Maersk container parked right in front of us.
We had a delicious lunch of fish and chips for Tom, and fried scallops for Debbie. Both were very delicious.
We drove through Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge on the way to Calais, Maine.
Yep, there was a border crossing here.
Debbie saw on Roadside America that there were mile posts made of hand carved stone on the road out of Calais.
This area is known for its enormous differences between high and low tide, and they aren't kidding.
We stopped at a roadside attraction outside Perry, Maine, marking the location of the 45th parallel, which marks the halfway point between the equator and the north pole. The stone was orignally placed here in 1896 to mark the hard work by the survey teams that painstakingly mapped the nearby coastline of Maine.
Just down the road from the marker is a souvenir shop with a much more colorful globe illustrating the location of the 45th parallel around the world. The shop was closed and looked abandoned.
Near Edmunds, we re-entered another section of the 30,000 acre Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge
One thing about travelling on a single lane highway like US 1 is that when you get behind a big piece of farm equipment like this one, you may be there for a while until you can safely pass. At least with this particular tractor, we were able to see under it to know if there was any oncoming traffic.
Outside of Jonesboro, we passed the Blueberry Hill Farm Lab, a facility run by the University of Maine devoted to research on wild blueberries. While we were trying to figure out what kind of research they were doing, we passed Wild Blueberry Land, a museum-bakery-gift shop devoted to all things blueberry.
This beautiful building with the giant bow on it is the Worchester Wreath Company in Harrington, Maine.
Hey. That's the Atlantic Ocean out there.
This is the bridge over the Mt. Desert Narrows in West Sullivan.
Looking back, Debbie noticed that we had been on the Schoodic National Scenic Byway. It runs from West Sullivan southward to the Schoodic Penninsula and Acadia National Park.
A few miles down the road, we passed a series of crustacean-themed statues on the side of the road. There was this crab, ...
.. this lobster, ...
... and this other lobster.
Kudos for working the location into your business name.
Another bonus of taking this route was driving through all of the small towns and seeing the old, ornate theaters. This one, The Grand in Ellsworth, Maine, is still putting on live performances of Nunsense.
More fall color starting to emerge.
There were piles of boulders sticking up out of the grasslands, and we couldn't decide if they were natural formations, which seemed unlikely, or if they had been placed there. Either way they were interesting to see.
Just after 4 PM, we arrived at our destination for the night: Fort Knox KOA Holiday outside of Bucksport, Maine.
We had reserved the Treehouse, which is an elevated deluxe cabin that sleeps four and has a full bathroom and kitchen.
It has a huge patio area, with seating for four at the table, plus another seating area with a couch and chairs off to the side.
The inside is incredibly beautiful, completely finished in natural wood. There is a queen bed, ...
... and two bunk beds, plus a refrigerator with a separate freezer compartment.
The bunk beds were built right into the walls, and looked like they would be fun to sleep in.
The bathroom had a full-sized shower, toilet, ...
... and sink.
The freezer was large enough to hold all of our water bottles that we wanted to freeze, plus a plastic bag containing the leftover ice still in our coolers. Amazing.
The refrigerator held everything else in our two coolers, with room for more.
We celebrated with hot chocolate out on the patio.
We were thrilled to be staying in a KOA again. It felt like we were right at home, even if it was odd to be there without our RV.
Debbie spotted some movement on the retaining wall in the distance, and was quick enough with her camera to catch this chipmunk who had stopped for a snack. She was not quick enough to get a picture of the chipmunk's companion, a rat that ducked under the cabin a few feet away. We saw the rat again later as it scurried from the cabin to under some nearby stairs, but we just weren't fast enough to get a picture.
The treehouse is quite a ways up, and let us feel like we were in our own private haven.
We spent some time relaxing in the two-person hammock that was slung under the cabin.
It was so nice on the patio that we decided to have our dinner out there as well. Tonight was freeze-dried spaghetti, another one of our favorite meals from Backpacker's Pantry.
We watched this downy woodpecker flit around in the tree for a while, and then headed inside for the evening.

Miles today: 360. Total miles from Fort Kent, Maine: 360.

Day 6 >


East Coast 2021: [Day 1 - Erie, PA] [Day 2 - Syracuse, NY] [Day 3 - Littleton, NH] [Day 4 - Ft. Kent, ME] [Day 5 - Bucksport, ME] [Day 6 - Hampton, NH] [Day 7 - Branford, CT] [Day 8 - Bensalem, PA] [Day 9 - Jessup, MD] [Day 10 - Petersburg, VA] [Day 11 - Columbia, SC] [Day 12 - Baxley, GA] [Day 13 - Titusville, FL] [Day 14 - Homestead, FL] [Day 15 - Homestead, FL] [Day 16 - Homestead, FL] [Day 17 - Tavernier, FL] [Day 18 - Marathon, FL] [Day 19 - Gainesville, FL] [Day 20 - Natchez, MS] [Day 21 - Nashville, TN] [Day 22 - Heading Home]

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