October 6

Maine Fingers

We slept until 11 - eastern time, that is, or just about the same time we would be getting up at home. Except instead of joining the traffic chaos and going to work we got on the empty turnpike and headed north. Not too far, just to Freeport, where US-1 somehow got stuck in a factory outlet store that was - well, the town. Not a mall, nicely to the side with sufficient parking; no, all the little houses on the main street, and the side streets; resulting in a nice traffic chaos. We aborted halfway through town, retreated to Crickets restaurant for a good lunch, and bypassed Freeport on I-95.

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And now what? The map of Maine that we have is not really of high resolution; the map of my Garmin GPS-3 may represent the state of the art for 1997, but it doesn't know about most of the roads around here. So we are back to the way I always used to travel - have a general idea where to go, what to expect, and leave the rest up to chance. Clearly this was something that Essan wasn't quite as easy with, as it's against her Asian self as she said: trying to get the most out of something in a given amount of time...

The coastline here in Maine is in may ways similar to that in Norway: long fingers reaching into the ocean, presenting a very spectacular scenery. At the same time it's very hard to get around, because you drive down a finger, are duly impressed, need to drive back up, and down another finger. This is in contrast to Norway, where the road goes along the coast - you get the amazing scenery for free whether you want it or not. In Maine, you can get quickly from A to B if you want to, and can take detours if you choose to. But a purely scenic drive without re-runs is harder to accomplish.

We ended up in Camden in a nice motel, and had dinner in one of the towns restaurants. Very much to my surprise Essan didn't nibble on a lived lobber, unlike most guests, but rather settled on some sort of fish. For me, the menu didn't give much in terms of land animal food, so I chose the usual steak, which was presented to me in great size and quality; the offered Heinz sauce made me feel moderately good about supporting Teresa and her company, but it didn't help much with the steak experience.