On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
I have only been to Maine once, but I fell in love. ~WaterGirl
JanieM
Maine, my adopted home, is devoted to its public lands, including state and local parks; land set aside by land trusts (I volunteer for one that has more than 6000 acres and fifty miles of well-maintained trails in its care) Baxter State Park; Acadia National Park; and – not technically in Maine, but you could throw a stone there from Lubec – Roosevelt Campobello International Park. Several kinds of parks are represented in these pictures and in Part II, which will come later. I’ve traveled in the area a lot, but these particular shots were taken in April of 2014.
In Quoddy Head State Park, where there’s a beautiful cliff trail (I walked it before I had a digital camera to carry with me all the time, so no pics). This is the easternmost point of land in the continental US, and as I just discovered when I looked up the park in Wikipedia, “the closest geographic point in the United States to the African continent.”
Lubec, Eastport, and Bar Harbor had a bit of a squabble preceding the millennium over who would get the first gleam of sunlight on 1/1/2000. For some chuckles, here’s an article about it.
Taken from next to the base of the lighthouse. I hope to check out Grand Manan when we can all go traveling again.
You cross the little bridge, show your passport to the Canadian border guard, and you’re on Campobello Island, where the Roosevelts had a summer “cottage” that was made into a park 56 years ago. I took the indoor tour once, but this trip was just before the park officially opened for the season, so we couldn’t go inside. The staff were getting the place ready to celebrate the park’s 50th anniversary. This shot was taken from the shore.
In a reversal from my usual experience, on this trip the Canadian border guard was a bit crabby, and the US one was friendly. We established that his kid had played in a basketball tournament at the high school up the hill from my house, four+ hours from Lubec, and the fact that I knew the name of that high school was apparently proof of my legitimacy. Either that or it was my sweet, innocent face and manner. ;-)
From the park website: “Roosevelt Campobello International Park is the only park in the world jointly managed, staffed, and owned by the peoples of two countries and administered by a joint commission in their name.”
Looking across the water to Eastport. It’s a couple of miles by water from Lubec or Campobello to Eastport, but almost forty miles by land, through beautiful, spare countryside. This was a busy region in the days of sailing ships and sardine canneries, but time has sort of left it behind. That may change again, especially if shipping starts to come through the arctic, since Eastport has the deepest harbor in the continental US and is the nearest US port to China by the arctic route. It’s hard to know what to hope for…
Mostly I like the picture because it has the flavor of “another land made of water” (to borrow a phrase from folksinger Gordon Bok).
From Lubec to Campobello—not strictly in the park, but I wanted something to show how close Campobello is to Lubec.
Also not inside a park, but just another example of how everywhere you turn in this area, there’s another beautiful vista – and especially, given our “After Dark” goals – a calming one. Then again, I’ve never lived through a winter out there. Even April was fairly grim compared to summer, which is when I’ve visited most often.
Saving the best for last—this is one of my favorite places on earth. The picture doesn’t remotely do it justice, maybe because of my (lack of) photography skills, but at least in part because a photo can’t convey the sounds and smells, or the effect of being here over a daily cycle of tides. Not really falls, but more like rapids, it’s a narrow channel, with a hill of rock in the center of it, in an area where the tidal range is exceptionally high – over twenty feet in this spot, though it’s hard to find precise numbers.
I took an “eco-tour” through this channel in a Zodiac once, and the tour guide cited the “rule of twelfths” – for every roughly six hours between low and high tide, 1/12 of the water flows in the first and sixth hours, 2/12 in the second and fifth, and 3/12 each in the third and fourth. I first saw the falls halfway between high and low tide, and the force of the water was staggering. Then, at high and low tide, presuming a not-windy day, everything gets very, very quiet for just a little while, and then you start to hear a little tiny burble, and the tide has reversed and the water is flowing again. I once stuck around for the entire six+ hours, to experience the whole sequence. I would have stayed longer, but the once-barely-functioning outhouses had been vandalized to the point of uselessness. I haven’t been back for a few years, so I don’t know if they’ve been repaired/restored. It’s a town-owned park—very minimalist.
The Bay of Fundy, of which this area is a part, is known for its eddies and whirlpools, the Old Sow being the biggest and most famous. “Cobscook”—as in Cobscook Bay, one of the subsets of the Bay of Fundy—means “boiling tides” in the language of the Passamaquoddy tribe, which has a reservation at Sipayik, or Pleasant Point, on the peninsula leading from the mainland to Eastport. I took a linguistics field methods class some years ago, and our informants (for practicing) were Passamaquoddies. It’s a living but “private” language … fascinating topic but too big for this space.
The DNI/FBI Announcement On Election Interference: Before Anyone Asks, I Really Have No Idea
WaterGirl
As usual, my favorite pictures are the ones of the water. Love the one where I feel like I could just walk down the pier to the water.
SiubhanDuinne
The photos are beautiful, and your commentary fascinating and enlightening. Thank you sharing this wonderful place. More for the bucket list.
JanieM
@SiubhanDuinne: Come to Maine! We can have a meetup — I think there are quite a few Mainers who comment here. It would be a great way to celebrate being able to travel again.
CaseyL
Staying six hours for the entire tidal change sounds like a lovely meditative way to spend the day.
I spent a couple days in Maine as part of a cruise some years back, through New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces. It was delightful. I have to say I loved the coast most; the stern rocky shore has a powerful appeal.
Seeing more of Maine is not only on my bucket list, but as a possible post-retirement relocation destination (JanieM and I have been corresponding a little about that). These On the Road photo-essays are great, giving glimpses into areas I’m considering exploring, maybe next year.
Thanks so much!
Nutmeg again
Lovely! so many feels. All the feels. Thanks.
Xavier
Three place in the US stand out for me for scenery: the Maine coast, the Oregon coast, and southern Utah…
JanieM
@CaseyL: I’ve got a thought train about this far downeast area simmering for you, but I haven’t had time to write it down.
@Xavier: The Oregon coast is beautiful, but as of when I traveled out there in the 70s, I’d give a slight edge to the coast of the Olympic peninsula. I hiked in the Grand Canyon on several trips, once for a couple of weeks, but never managed Utah. Maybe someday! Pictures of that area posted here have been amazing.
*****
For fun: “Lubec” is pronounced “Loo-BECK.” (Not to be confused with Lubbock. :-)
Also — I wrote that the Reversing Falls Park is a town park. To be clearer: Pembroke is a “town” of about 800 people. Driving through/past it on Route 1, you might not even realize it’s there.
SFAW
D) None of the above?
Cadillac Mountain, on Mt. Desert Island. Which is NOT Bar Harbor, thank you very much
ETA: No, I haven’t read the linked article yet. I’m sure it will tell me that I am, as usual, worng
ETA2: OK, so they mentioned Cadillac, and affirmed that it’s “outside Bar Harbor.” Po-TAY-toe, cla-MAH-toe
BigJimSlade
@CaseyL:
Until your bladder is bursting, apparently!
BigJimSlade
In a previous life, I lived in Boston for 15+ years, so I’ve been to Maine a few times. One time (the previous) we went up to a campground near Boothbay (Gray Homestead, before it got popular with RVs staying there for the whole summer taking the best spots) arriving at 10pm on a rainy night. We had the tents of our friends and set them up with flashlights (which is a little tricky when you’ve never set up their tents before). Since this was the deluge of the year, our friends stayed in Boston and came up the next morning – can’t say we blamed them.
But we had never been to this campground before and had the perfect campsites! … In the morning we found ourselves 30 feet above the water – it was blue sky and blue ocean and rocky coast and islands like an epiphany. They rented kayaks there, too, so we got to go out on that blue water :-)
Aleta
These have the real feel of that area the way I remember it. My aunt took me as a young teenager to Quoddy Head and around, giving me the realization of another world. We camped there. That trip changed my life. (The first time I went to Maine was to Deer Isle where she and her kids were camping and working to make money by gathering seaweed.) These photos make me want to go back up there. Thanks.
suezboo
not to rain on your parade or anything like that as your pictures of places i will never see are fascinating, but your guide lied to you. i refer you to the kgalagadi transfrontier park, jointly run by south africa and botswana and ai-ais with namibia. there are others with zimbabwe and mozambique. sa national parks seems to enjoy doing this.
JanieM
@suezboo: You didn’t read what I wrote. I didn’t say anything about a guide, I quoted from the park website.
However, I gave the wrong link; the park’s website doesn’t say it that way anymore, it just says the park is “singular.” The quote is from the National Park Service site, and the passage I quoted is still there. Take it up with them if it bothers you so much
Apologies for getting the two websites mixed up.
Miss Bianca
I miss Maine so much. Don’t get me wrong, I love Colorado, but there have been times when I wonder how my life might have turned out if I had turned my footsteps towards Maine 20-odd years ago instead.
DaveInOz
We stayed in Lubec in 2012 after visiting relatives in Halifax and then heading slowly back to New York to get the flight home. It’s a beautiful little town and well worth a visit.
We also had problems with the border crossing between Lubec and Campbello Island, but this time on the way back into Lubec. The US border guard claimed that my wife looked nothing like her passport photo and was refusing us entry back to the town we were staying in. Fortunately, the guard accepted that my wife’s Australian driving license picture was indeed her and allowed us in.