Day 5

Again, we woke up kind of late today. It was about 11:30 by the time we were out of the bathrooms and ready to go. I think it’s the cloudy skies that are causing us to sleep in. We stopped in the office and talked to a ranger outside. I asked him if he had any suggestions for sights to see in the area. He gave us a few but all of them were either too expensive or would take too much time. I wanted to do the Mt. Washington Auto Road, but this was $15 for a car and one adult and $6 for each additional adult. No thanks. Especially if it’s going to be overcast.

Then we asked him if he knew of any good places to eat. He immediately began raving about this place in town called the Loaf Around Bakery. “They bake their own bread and everything is homemade,” he told us. He gave us the directions and we were off. We were hungry since we hadn’t really had dinner last night.

The town of Gorham is a tourist town. In the winter it caters to skiers, in the summer the White Mountains attract many vacationers for various outdoor activities, and the autumn brings the leaf peepers. Many of the old buildings have been renovated, which makes the town look very clean. A building nearby was dated 1858. We drove around hoping we would find our way to this Loaf Around Bakery. It is up a small side street, Exchange Street.

We walked into the place and it was very interesting looking. The inside was immaculate and the decor was very warm and personable. I think most restaurants, afraid of losing customers, go for the drab, generic decor and we’ve become so accustomed to this that when we find a place like this it’s twice as special. This is a place that’s not afraid to put up hand-written signs.

The menu is typed and contained some of the strangest sandwiches I’d ever seen. There were about 15 or 20 sandwiches, one that I remember: peanut butter-raisin-bacon. All of these, of course, are served on your choice of about eight homemade breads with as many grains as you desire. The rest of the menu was just as interesting. I stayed with something safe, chicken salad on white. Suzanne got an omelet which I ended up finishing for her.

While we were waiting for our food, I overheard one of the locals warning someone before they entered the bathroom, “Careful, it hasn’t been renovated since the late eighteen-hundreds.” This would be interesting. Suzanne was the first to explore.

She came back with this to say: “You gotta go see it.”

“Why?”

“You’ve just got to see it.”

So after we ate, I went to wash my hands. In how many restaurants have you made it a point to see the bathroom of all places? I opened the hand-painted door which takes you to the hallway behind the counter. On the right is the bathroom door. I opened it and stepped into the room. It was very large for a bathroom, even by today’s standards. It was a fully equipped bathroom with a cast iron bathtub with large feet. All the fixtures appeared to be originals. The toilet was, well… it’ll take a few sentences to describe. First, it was the type with a pull-the-chain flusher and it was not just a toilet, but a piece of furniture. It was not shaped like a toilet, but was basically a bench with a segment in the middle for you know what. The seat was made of wood (with a lot of varnish so as not to get splinters) and was above a tiny porcelain bowl resembling a slightly larger version of the dentist’s spittoon. The seat was not like a circular ring we have today, but was a square with an oval cut out of the middle. This oval was not that large either, I don’t think a particularly large person would be fully accommodated if you know what I mean. Right next to the seat was a cute hand-written poem that, in rhyme, requested that men sit for all occasions. The sink was old, separate hot and cold spigots, and the tub had a layer of dirt on the bottom. Quite a charmer. Later we noticed all the people in the place were wearing T-shirts with the old fashioned toilet on the back. Is this the symbol for the Loaf Around Bakery?

Before leaving, we had to sample the baked goods in the display case near the door, after all, this is a bakery and after the impression made thus far, how could we go wrong on the delectables in the display case? I got a lemon-cinnamon muffin while Suzanne got an apple turnover.

Although I could probably have sat in this place all day, we both knew we had to get going, so off we went. Continuing along US 2, which paralleled the Androscoggin River, we were soon in Maine. Although we’ve seen warnings about the many moose and bear in the area, we have yet to see one. By now it was apparent that it was going to be another cloudy day, at least it wasn’t raining.

The first large town was Rumford, Maine. Route 2 is like a maze through this town, winding around and around—it’s like you’re going in circles. There’s also a paper plant in this town which begs the question: how do people live with this smell 24 hours a day? We couldn’t stand it for 10 minutes. The next town was Farmington. This road was not too bad as far as traffic went. Not too many towns to slow you down. Suzanne said we should take ME 27 south, I didn’t know if we’d passed it or not, but it soon arrived, just in the nick of time—we had been behind a slow person for a while.

ME 27 shoots down to I-95 and Augusta. It was not crowded at all. Along the way Suzanne saw another interesting sign nailed on a tree. It simply said “HELL” with an arrow pointing down, Suzanne wanted a picture. Soon we were in Augusta, another state capital. We didn’t see the Capital but we did drive by the Civic Center—this was awfully exciting let me tell you. In Augusta, we picked up ME 3 which heads east toward Belfast and US 1. Actually, we visited many world-famous places in Maine, we drove through Mexico, West Peru, Vienna, Belgrade, Rome, South China, and Belfast. And looking at the map I can see Madrid, Denmark, Poland, Norway, Moscow, and Athens as well. Who knew all of this was up here in Maine?

I’ve been dreading Route 1. The traffic has not been too bad today but I knew this would change once we hit 1. And it did. We went over the scenic bridge at Bucksport, as I did on last year’s trip, eventually making it to Ellsworth, the turn-off for Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. By the time we arrived at the visitor center, it was about 5:30 and, as I expected, it was closed. We picked up maps though and headed for the campground. We figured we’d try the closer campground, Blackwoods Campground. For some reason we didn’t stay in this campground last year, it may have been closed for repair, perhaps we could stay there this year. Well, we drove all the way down there to find that it is a by-reservation-only campground, that’s why we didn’t stay there last year. No problem, we’d just have to drive a few more miles.

As the crow flies, Seawall Campground is just under 7 miles away; however, because there are no direct roads and we’re on the other side of the island with Somes Sound separating the two sides, the trip by car is about 25 miles. It didn’t help when we lost the road we were on. We stayed on ME 3 but once we entered the small town of Northeast Harbor, we somehow found ourselves in a neighborhood off the main road. We passed some incredible houses, some very old, some just being built. It appeared as though we were driving parallel to the water. The only marked road on our map, besides ME 3, was Sargent Drive. We soon saw a sign for this road but weren’t sure which way to turn, I guess we’d find out soon enough. This road is part of the park and hugs the eastern bank of Somes Sound, later meeting up with Route 3.

It turns out we did turn the right way and, in the end, I was glad we got lost because this is a very scenic road that Sergio and I did not find last year. Along the way I stopped at one of those roadside information signs put up by the park. This sign told us we were looking at the only fjord in the eastern US.

“What is a fjord, anyway?” Suzanne asked.

“It’s… umm, well if you have a river…” I was trying to think, eventually resorting to, “I don’t know.” Now I’m able to pull out the dictionary and look it up: a long narrow inlet from the sea between two high cliffs. Looking back on things, I wouldn’t say there were two high cliffs but there were two mountains of rock on either side. Anyway, after driving all the way around Somes Sound, we turned south on ME 102 and drove down the west bank of the sound, through Southwest Harbor, and finally reaching Seawall Campground. We tried to find a good site but it was difficult. There were only about four other groups in this loop of the campground so that was not a problem. The problem was water. We stayed in the D loop which offers cheaper walk-in sites, some are 10 to 20 yards away from the parking area, others are hundreds of yards away.

We walked and walked looking for a decent site. The problem was that there was water everywhere. With water, of course, comes mosquitoes. I would go so far as to say it was swampy—there were some sites that you couldn’t get to because of the large pools of water. We chose one that was very wet but there was no standing water in our way. There was one part of the path between the site and the car where there was a pool of water but there were two cement blocks to step on. I don’t know where they came from because this was the only site we’d seen that had these, presumably for walking on. I was glad they were there because if it were to rain tonight there would probably be a large pool of water out there tomorrow morning.

We set the tent up and went to see the seawall before it got dark. There was no one at the seawall except for two guys having a conversation in the parking area, both were sitting in their pickup trucks which were running. This was a bit strange I thought. It was getting very foggy now, you could see the fog rolling in off the water. We climbed around for a while, I took some pictures, and Suzanne was admiring the rocks.

Next we set off to get something to eat. I remembered that there was not too much around this part of the island, everything in Southwest Harbor was a bit dressy so we decided to go to Bar Harbor to find something. We parked the car and walked around the streets surrounding the town square. This is where the main tourist-type places are. There are many places to choose from and we ended up eating at an Italian place. We got a pizza with tomato and mushrooms. The pizzas that other people were getting looked good, homemade even. There was a slight delay due to a pizza jam in the oven, too many pizzas to cook, but once it hit the table it was great.

After dinner we walked around a bit contemplating the many ice cream parlors nearby. We stopped in one and I got peanut butter swirl, which was very good. We sat on a bench and ate our ice cream while the people walked by. It was now about 9 o’clock and it seemed as though the adults were going to bed and the kids were coming out. Less gray-haired, sweater wrapped around the neck types, more dyed-hair, tattooed types along with their loud music. We walked back to the car and drove the 15 or 20 mile ride home. It began sprinkling a bit on the way home. Hope we could get to the tent before the deluge.