Maine!

Our epic journey was triggered by the marriage of my little cousin, Martha, at Fort Knox in Maine.  She's an officer and pilot in the Navy, marrying the same.

With our mutual uncle (yes, Anne-Marie, THAT uncle):


 Love this pic :)

The wedding and reception really were amazing (with a bigger fireworks display than my town had on the 4th of July), but they made me feel very old and boring, too.

There's one great thing about that part of Maine: a plethora of used book stores.  Seriously, everywhere you looked there was another one.  I ended up buying 5 books while there, and whimpered when we passed an enormous book store that puts my beloved Book Barn to shame.  My kind of town!

We mainly hung around Belfast and Bar Harbor.  While at Bar Harbor (on the day following the wedding), Rick and I went on a whale watch.  Did you know that coastal Maine has fog?  There's fog.  A lot of fog.  And then there's more fog when you're done with that patch.  Fog.

Here's a cruise ship enjoying the fog:

It got thicker out to sea.

The whale watch was through fog.  Visibility was low, and the ocean looked like liquid hematite that softened and joined with the drifting grey that surrounded us.  I got sunburned through the fog, not to mention drenched by it when I wedged myself into the bow as we raced out over miles of ocean to the first stop.  That was really freaky, as there was so little water to be seen and it kept looking like it was going up, up, up at times like we were climbing the back of an enormous swell.  I was always tensed for the big downhill that never came.

We first went to an island where puffins are nesting, and yep we heard them.  We couldn't even see the island through the fog, although the breaks from the waves on the cliffs were visible as bursts of white uncomfortably close to the boat.  At times, the lighthouse could be seen as an enormous, towering giant shadow through the fog.  Looking at it, I suddenly understood how Stephen King ended up writing what he did.  It was really freaky and desperately tried to grab your imagination and take it in horrible directions.  Anyway, we saw several puffins and various other auks fly by, shrouded in grey.

We then went looking for whales.  On the other side of the boat, there was supposedly a short glimpse of a minke whale, but I missed it entirely.  We did see a lot of sea birds, including gennets and terns, and had a brief spotting of a harbor seal as it popped up to breathe.  In all actuality, it looked like nothing more than a plain, grey lobster float adrift in a grey sea under a grey sky.

No pictures from the sea; my camera couldn't focus on anything in all the grey.

After receiving rain check tickets since whales were scarce, we headed to Acadia Park to dive up Cadillac Mountain as we raced the sunset.

Sunset, you say?

The mountain gave an awesome view of fog!

The next day, we left for Niagra Falls, Canada.

Another interesting thing about Maine was the foliage.  The leaves in the trees were the bright green of early spring, and the oaks weren't fully leafed yet.  Of course, there was a ton of paper birch which we sadly don't see much of here, and I kept noticing that there were smatterings of tiny, white flowers in the grass.  When we finally stopped, I realized they were wild strawberry flowers.

I know that trees come back at different times depending on where you are (I remember Funder's pics of TN, showing green when I was still looking at dismal brown), but I was still surprised at how late it was around there.