The North

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No Woman No Cry by Bob Marley

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A fountain and an awesome old church in a park by Augusta.

 

 Last week, we drove up to the Bangor area for a few reasons. One - we just really wanted to get out of town for a while. Two - We'd never been, and we were told that the Northern part of Maine would suit us well. Three - They need managers up there, and there's a slightly better chance for someone to get into the position of manager if he was in the area, or at least willing to head that way, so we figured we'd better check it out, just in case.

 So we installed the sleeping platform for the first time since we moved here, loaded up the mattress, blankets and dogs and took off. We'd initially planned on driving all day, spending the night in Acadia and heading home the next day in time for me to work at one, but once we got up there,w e realized that it would be too difficult to get packed and home in time for me to turn right around, so we cut our trip a bit short. (It was also blasted cold and windy)

In case that photo above wasn't obvious, the water has clearly been unsafe for quite some time...

Bangor is an interesting area. Smallish, with an outsized downtown area and a number of tentacled roads strewn about, we got lost quite a bit. (The fact that our GPS, ThomThom kept getting us lost did not help either.) Generally, we liked what we saw. It was more Western-feeling than most of the rest of the state, somehow. Obviously, it's a tiny bit more rural and ag based, but there was something more, something a bit more undefinable.

It was really driven home when we left Bangor, cruised through Brewer, which lined the opposite river band, and headed into Ellsworth. More than anything, it felt like we were driving between a couple of random towns in Eastern Montana - a lot of tractor dealers, mobile homes, motels, local businesses and hardware stores... We kind of felt at home. Which is a bit sad, since a lot of people around here think Ellsworth is a bit run down. We ate at a drive-in, where Linz accidentally dropped my wallet in the parking lot (Which we promptly found again) and we had a huge pile of skinny onion rings. The rest of the food was pretty good, though the burgers weren't spectacular, but a large part of that may have been the atmosphere. I was still quite sick, Linz was just starting to get sick and it was cold and blustery.

After we ate, we drove East a bit, stopping in at a comic book store. The shop was a bit of a disaster, with piles of stuff everywhere. Literally. The register was manned by a pleasant young man in a wheelchair and there was no possible way he could even get to 80% of the store. In their defense, they did appear to be installing some new racks of shelves, but man, there was a lot of stuff that looked more like someone's household storage. That said, he was nice and they had a couple of trades we'd wanted, and it was a comic book shop, for heck's sake! If it's open at all, its a good thing.

We took the roundabout route home, through Belfast and around, but didn't really stop much, just to gas up at exorbitant prices or to potty the dogs, who were very good for the ride.

Ellsworth was a fun area. It was clear that it becomes inundated in the summer, being the doorway to Acadia and all, but we could see ourselves being pretty comfortable there. (And Linz should have a cake time of finding a hotel job there, the town was loaded with 'em!)

We plan to make a second, more thorough trip up in a week or so, more then!

The ROUS FAMILY -