The gas furnace heating the apartment failed on Friday.  We spent Friday night in another unit, amid a couple of attempts to repair the furnace.  Parts were on order, but the other unit was not as comfortable as the one we’ve been inhabiting.  So, we decided to drive to Bangor for brunch.

We arrive about 10am at the Nest Café.  We enjoyed avocado toast with local college students.  Clearly, we were the oldest in the room.  Afterwards, knowing the furnace was still inop, Deb suggested we drive to either Calais (pronounced “callous”) or Bar Harbor.  Calais involved a couple hours longer driving, so we went to Bar Harbor for the first time since the mid 1980s when we camped our way around Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Entering Bar Harbor, the car made an unexpected stop at Fab-ri-Cate, a quilting shop.  Deb found some Maine-themed fabric and a pattern or two.  We enjoyed chatting with the staff about how central Maine has changed for the worse with the loss of paper mills.  Lower employment and prosperity, but lower stink, too!

We moved the car over to the village green and walked around town for a while.  Bar Harbor is clearly a tourist town, and hordes of folks from “away” descend on it during th summer.  The wind off Frenchman Bay was quite chilly.  After a while, we drove the car to a recommended lunch spot.

The green pyramid on the village green seems to be a weather cover over a fountain. We saw a few of them in the two parks/ green spaces.

The Side Street Café had a distinct advantage over the Indian and Thai restaurants:  it was open!  The season in Bar Harbor starts in mid-April, so we were a couple of weeks early.  Deb had the beet salad and a brown ale (American Brewing Company).  I had the chicken caprese salad and a Coastal Haze IPS from Baxter Brewery.

Back to Lincoln after lunch.  The Master’s golf tourney is on, so it’s on the telly.  Furnace is fixed and we’re warm again.

It’s a sleety day in Maine, unlike the 85 degrees at Raleigh today. Temp got all the way to 30 today! You’ll have seen our previous re-visit to the Katahdin view. We got home and are making chili verde. What you see in these pix is why we travel in a motorhome when the clime is friendly. We’ve had to buy a blender, another chef knife, cutting mats, a dutch oven and numerous spices to kinda sorta not replicate our gourmand arrangements at home. We have a better arrangement in the Goose! Note the electric stove … poor pitiful us with our Third First World problems!

Our friends Dave and Barb have bought a cabin somewhere near Belfast, Maine, so we decided to explore there. You’ll have read our post on Bucksport, which was the first exploration near the cabin. We have no idea of the exact location of the cabin, so we are unrestrained in our exploration.

Belfast is a little over an hour from where we are. It is on the Passagassawakeag River (easy for YOU to say!). We headed first to the Marshall Wharf Brewing Company, given our arrival about 1pm. Great local brew in an outside/ covered atrium with a huge tank heater. Food was passable, but the beer was so good that Jim took away a growler of Florida Man IPA for later consumption. It’s gone now.

Then, of course, we walked around town. We bought cheese at the local shop; a wooden spoon at a kitchen store; a wonderful book about a helper of Rick Steves at https://www.olsonbooks.com/; and we stopped at Heavenly Yarns. Despite their best intentions, we didn’t buy any yarn. A first!

On the recommendation of friends, we headed to Bucksport, Maine, on Tuesday.  It’s a town near the point where the Penobscot River empties into the Atlantic Ocean, down east in the general direction of Castine and Acadia National Park.  We headed there for the river walk and a particular brew pub, that being one of the organizing principles of our time in Maine.  A drive of a little more than an hour got us there.

We parked and started on the river walk.  Across the Penobscot River, we saw the Penobscot Narrows Bridge (an emergency replacement for the previous Waldo-Hancock bridge) and a civil war emplacement, Fort Knox.  No shots were ever fired from Fort Knox.

There was much evidence of the nine-foot tidal range.  Pontoon platforms were stacked out of the river, waiting for the busy summer tourist time.  Then it started to sprinkle, so we cut short our river walk, and headed for lunch.

The Friar’s Brewhouse serves the “temporal needs” of three Anglican/ Franciscan brothers.  They wear brown habits and bear the brunt of all the usual tourist questions and comments.  They bake the bread and brew the ales sold in the Brewhouse.  Debbi had a lobster roll, and I their other specialty, the Banh Mi sandwich.  Food was great, the Irish Red ale was wonderfully cloudy and delicious.  Unfortunately, the beer is only sold from the tap, so no way to bring away some for later.

We drove some of the back streets and saw some beautiful old houses.  The town was built on fishing, shipbuilding and lumber, and saw its heyday many decades ago.  The Penobscot River and the town were the site of an American naval defeat in 1779. 

The fourth March weekend in Maine is Maple Syrup Weekend, particularly Sunday.  Since it is supposed to snow five inches tonight, Debbi and I set out on Saturday to learn about maple syrup.  We first headed west to Dover-Foxcroft, to Bob’s Sugar Shack (https://mainemaplesyrup.com/).  Bob is 80 and has been making maple syrup for 70 years.  It’s a commercial operation and accessible to many areas, so there were a bunch of people. The retail shop offered lots of maple products—syrup in a variety of shapes and sizes of containers, maple sugar candy, maple-syrup glazed popcorn, maple flavored BBQ rub, and maple sugar cotton candy!  Helpers were serving small bites of maple cookies and even vanilla ice cream with maple syrup on top (Deb nommed that!)

Bob’s operation uses oil fired burners to boil off the water content of maple sap to reveal maple syrup.  We chatted with Bob and a couple of his folks about the very large boiler.  At full blast, the burners use 27 gallons of fuel oil an hour to reduce the maple sap by a 40:1 ratio down to syrup.  Bob buys sap from 6000 taps over six local areas, and there can be up to four taps per tree.  The sap is collected into very large tanks and gravity fed into the boiler.  The boiler uses heat recovery to warm the incoming sap to almost the boiling point.  It then follows a serpentine path in the boiler to get all the water out.  Think the waiting line for the E-ride at Disney, back and forth until you get to the prize.  The boiling area is very steamy, warm and humid.  Our skin rejoiced at humidity for the first time since early February!

We then headed northwest to Shirley to a smaller sugar shack.  Baker’s Maple Syrup (https://sites.google.com/site/bakersmaplesyrup) is in the Maine highlands (ears popped on the drive there) and taps about 1300 trees, with a gravity feed down to the shack.  They use a vacuum pump to suck the sap down from the trees, because the closest tree is about 1000 feet away from the shack.  Sap flow is at the mercy of temperature.  If the temp is freezing, then the sap freezes in the collection tubes.  Today, the temp topped out at 37°F, so the sap was not flowing real well.  Mr. Baker has been making syrup for 40 years.  Here we learned of the complexity attendant to syrup;  temperature and humidity affect everything; hygrometers and hydrometers are essential!  This boiler is fired with birch offcuts from a local sawmill, in a cast iron firebox from Quebec.  They monitor the flue temperature, wanting it to range between 600°-900°.  They do have a small (800 gallons) ready tank, but truly depend on sap flowing.  Again, warmth and humidity were wonderful!

Of course, we bought syrup and candy at both places. You can order maple-anything online!

Afterward, we were hungry, so found the Dockside Inn in Greenville.  The pub sits right on Moosehead Lake, and clearly will be touristy in summer.  We watched snowmobiles on the lake, and wondered that the ice was still strong enough to support them. The seafood chowder was muy delicioso and the Baxter IPA was also. Deb had a Swedish pear cider, Rekorderlig. Imagine cider imported to South Carolina from Sweden, then shipped to Maine. Couldn’t some wandering mariner have brought it directly?

On our way home, we bought takeaway IPA at Bissell Brothers in Three Rivers.  Suds for the snowy day tomorrow!

Looked out the back of the apartment this morning and saw a flock of about twenty wild turkeys making their way through the woods some distance off. Grabbed my camera, put on a 200mm zoom and shot a few pictures.

This is not the first time we’ve seen wild turkeys. Twice, we have seen a handful alongside I-95. We presume they are browsing the snow for the salt from road treatment.

Most folks know that I-95 is one of the most important north-south highways on the US east coast.  It stretches from Maine to Miami, a little over 1900 miles.  We’ve been to the southern end, and since we’re in Maine, decided to go to the northern end, which is a few miles east of Houlton, Maine, on the border with New Brunswick, Canada. 

We set off cross-country on Saturday, traveling through the small towns of Lee, Springfield, Danforth, Orient, Cary Township and Hodgdon.  Again, lots of snowy fields, pine and birch trees and rolling hills.  It felt like it did when we were bucketing across Scotland, as the roads are up and down and quite rough from frost heave.

We got to Houlton feeling hangry, so we found a lovely brew pub, the Shire Ale House.  It is inside an indoor arcade, in the old sense of arcade.  A family bought the arcade and are developing it.  There’s a kitchen gadgets store, a shop selling crystals and incense, the brew pub and a live gaming shop.  The gaming shop is board games, DnD, action figures and such, with maybe some computer games.  Lots of interesting folks. 

The brew pub seemed to be a combo of Irish and Hobbit, with neat names on the menu (see below).  Deb had the Gunslinger pork chop and I the Roast Beast, both of us the roasted root vegetables (lots of yummy beets!) and a glass of Mason porter.  You’ll remember from earlier post that we had lunch as the Mason Brewery in Bangor.  The food was great!

After lunch, we found a used book store and browsed for a while.  Deb found a great knitting book, but Jim was unable to find family histories, which he collects if they pertain to family lines.

We came back via I-95 for speed, also hoping for a different view of Mt. Katahdin than we saw on the way up.