Bar Harbor to Brooklyn ... culture shock!

In the space of 48 hours we have gone from this:

to this:

Feeling overwhelmed by a map of the New York transit system, we opted instead to go back to bed after breakfast in our lovely homestay in Brooklyn. I always thought "Brooklyn" would be something like a typical Auckland or Sydney suburb. WRONG .... it's 251 km² and home to 2.6 million people and a bloody LOT of VERY LOUD sirens. Overwhelming.

After lunch we did decide to venture out for a bit, and was gosmacked and delighted with what we found. Walking a block up to E 56th Street, we turned a corner onto Church Ave and found ourselve in Jamaica. Or Guyana. Or Vanuatu. Walking up to 44th Street on one side of the street, and back down the other, we saw one other white person. What a fabulously wonderful mishmash of cultures, shops, and street vendors ... no OSH or Permit Police here. It reminded me a lot of Vanuatu, and we stopped and chatted to a number of people along the way, who were all charming. We are so deligthed we're staying here and mingling with the real people, rather than the tourists in downtown NY.

Mother of mine in Church Ave, Brooklyn, New York

I pointed this coat out to Mum and said "Oh my gosh, that is sooooo New York" and a man walking past laughed himself silly. True enough.

Seriously????

Looking through an island store, you realised how limited we are with what we get in New Zealand.

 

Check the size of this avocado!!! A fellow shooper said they're Jamaican.

Total food shop: $11.28. God Bless America.

When there's no parking ... just double park. The streets are all like this in this area.

 

 

Our home in Brooklyn, NY, for four nights.

Maine Route 1

In 2010 we had a lovely time driving Route 1 to its end (or beginning) in Key West, so it was nice to catch up with an old friend and drive along it down the southern coast of Maine to Portland. Known as the Coastal Route, it provides a far more scenic and delighful alternative to Interstate 95.

Dotted with small towns, you could be forgiven for thinking you were on the other side of the Atlantic as we drove through Camden, Bath, Newcastle, Falmouth, Portsmouth, and Belfast, stopping for lunch in the delighful Wiscasset Village in a local cafe was just a few items on the menu ...

And this was just the INSIDE of the menu ... the front and back were also smothered in choices

Yes, that is snow in the foreground

On the road to Belfast!

 

 

Lincolnville Beach, Maine Route 1

Great view from the back of the Beyond the Sea bookstore in Lincolnville Beach, Maine Route 1

Wiscasset Village, Maine Route 1

A somewhat harrowing part of the trip was driving over the Penobscot Narrows Bridge that connects Verona Island to Prospect. While an attractive looking bridge from afar ...

... it is freaky as hell to drive over, since the span is on the inside and you feel like your're trapped on a tiny ledge on the outside. Check out this YouTube video to see what I mean ... jump forward to 1.25 when the actual bridge drive begins.

R n R in stunning Bar Harbor

Better writers than I have attempted to capture and convey the breath-taking natural beauty that is Bar Harbor on Mt Desert Island in Maine. I’m not even going to try with words; and my pictures really fail to do the area justice, but they do give some idea of the magnificence of the area.

Bar Harbor itself is a delightful little town that varies from 4400 hardy residents in the snows of winter, through to 50,000 once the white has departed and the mercury has clawed its way above freezing and beyond. Over the summer months the town is also blessed (or cursed, depending on your ideology) with around 120 cruise ships visiting to disgorge themselves of floods of tourists and, I imagine quite importantly to the region, tourist dollars. Thankfully, our visit was well out of peak season. 

Our main reason for visiting Bar Harbor was to finally meet Carrie Jones in person, the New York Times best-selling author of the fabulously wonderful series Need, Captivate, Entice, and Endure, who endorses my own novels with her awesomenessness. We called in the next morning, but missed Carrie so left a get well card for one of the dogs and the cat, who had both been to visit the vet that week. Then we went for a wander around this delightful little town, oohing and ahhing at the houses, and wondering if all the vampires left town over winter. There just have to be vampires living in many of those houses; you can tell just by looking at them.

Don't let the expression fool you ... off-season is a great time to visit Bar Harbor

LOVE the yellow school buses in the USA

Vampires totally live here!

Quite brisk!

Love the US post boxes.

Bark Harbor at Bar Harbor - awesome!

Dinner that night was at the rather lovely Galyn’s, where we had (and here I describe in detail for Pete ♥) a superb lobster bisque (Mum) and a divine tomato and basil soup (me), followed by a plate of garden salad each (this, I guess, is an American thing … they eat the salad first, not together with the main meal), and then for the mains (or entrées as the Americans call them … they should Google the word and see what it means) … fresh-I-was-swimming-this-morning haddock in a horseradish sauce (Mum) , and fresh-I-was-swimming-this-morning Maine salmon (me). Absolutely superb.

Dinner at Galyn's

Mmmmmm fresh Maine haddock and salmon

The next morning we paid a visit to the Museum at Bar Harbor College of the Atlantic, where all the displays were made by the students. Very impressive.And then it was time to meet up with Carrie, who is as delightful as I suspected, and had a real treat in store for us as we accompanied her to the local Rotary Meeting, where she was the Sergeant-at-Arms. What a treasure to meet the local people in such a touristy town and to hear a little bit about their lives. Very exciting.

With my FB friend Carrie Jones at the local Bar Harbor Rotary meeting. Awesomely lovely people; a real treat to meet them all.

After the meeting (and lunch - wow - thanx Carrie‼!) we followed Carrie’s tourism advice and headed into Arcadia National Park and up Cadillac Mountain, which blew us away with views, vistas, ice sculptures, deer, and trees that made it seem like we were driving through one of my cousin Lisa's  beautiful paintings (www.lisaelley.com). 

Driving through my cousin Lisa's paintings

Frozen waterfalls galore in Acadia National Park ... very exciting

Sand Beach - surfing only allowed during winter. I don't think so!

Sand Beach, Acadia National Park

Natural ice sculptures, Acadia National Park

On top of Cadillac Mountain, Arcadia National Park. How cold was it?

It was THIS cold!

The frozen waterfalls were simply breath-taking

Another vampire house, this one in Acadia National park. Probably for vegetarian vampires at this time of the year .... plenty of deer, not many humans

Proudly flying the flag on our drives around the USA

Just making it down the mountain by dark (around 4.15pm: freaky) we called into the delightfully kitsch Geddy’s for a … wait for it … Pumpkin Martini! Bwa ha ha … only in America.

The wonderfully touristy Geddy's Bar ...

... where I totally had a pumpkin martini!

Then it was back to the Atlantic for a swim, a soak in the hot tub, and then down to the bistro for dinner … where we found not a single item on the menu that was dairy free (Mum) or gluten free (me). Shame. Still, with the stunning view below not visible at night, and it being dark by 4pm, it wasn't such a loss.

Great view, but NOTHING dairy or gluten free

One of the best bistro view in the world

So, back into town, and to the Siam Thai Orchid Restaurant we had driven past the previous night. Thai is always a fairly safe bet for finding something dairy free AND something gluten free, and in Americaland we kind of need the dish to be both, as we usually order one meal between two. Contrary to popular belief there a not a lot of fat Americans around, but goodness, you’d think they all would be with the size of the meals. Maybe they have a high metabolism, or maybe they all get To Go boxes.

A light snowfall was once again presented for our enjoyment the morning we left … just enough to get some photos, before melting off to make the roads safe to drive on.

Another lovely dusting of snow to farewell us f rom Bar Harbor

Travel Day from Hell

I guess there is one in every trip. Hopefully that was our one and only - Monday November 17, 2014. OF COURSE it was a Monday.

We were due to fly from Toronto to Bangor (Maine) via Philadelphia at 11.37am. Holly and Google maps) said it's an hour and a half from Peterborough to Toronto in a good run, but because we’d hit early morning traffic we should allow three hours.  Setting the alarm for 5.45 I, of course, woke at 4.20am and couldn’t get back to sleep. Mum also woke early, so we managed to get on the road by just after 6am … and what a road it was! Stunning! There was the first big snowfall of the season the night before, and the scenery was gorgeously beautiful. Unfortunately, gorgeous snowfall makes for slow driving … S-L-O-W! In fact, it took us four hours to get from Peterborough to Toronto airport, due not only to the snow, but to two crashes on the 401, plus an extra fifteen minutes when our GPS steered us incorrectly.

Finally dropping the car off, it was another quarter hour till we arrived at the check-in kiosks, so despite leaving Holly’s house 140kms away five and a half hours before our scheduled flight time, the kiosk told us we were too late to check-in. However, a friendly staff member told us that the flight had been delayed by nearly an hour, so after passing through the delightfully efficient and friendly USA-customs-on-Canadian-soil people (hear that USA-customs-on-USA-soil people‼!) we boarded our flight for Philadelphia. Our scheduled connecting flight to Bangor wasn’t until 3.50pm, so we had plenty of time. Unfortunately, we had a lot more time than expected. Or wanted.

Our 3.50 flight was bumped to 4.15. And then to 5.15. And then to 6.15. And then to 7.15. And then to 8.00. And then to 8.15. They finally got the bird in the air about 8.45pm, at which point we were tired, and pretty fed up. Still, chatting to another displaced traveller we discovered it could have been worse. He had a woman sobbing on his shoulder after her flight was cancelled, and she was then rebooked and re-checked in to another five successive flights, all of which were cancelled on her. An Army lad heading back home from Afghanistan had been traveling all day, like us, and at one point had actually made it onto a plane in Texas, where they all sat for an hour and half, before being disembarked.

Worrying that the flight might arrive too late for us to a) pick up the rental car or b) check into the hotel in Bar Harbor (an hour’s drive from Bangor) we phoned the rental company (“no problem - we’re here till midnight”) and Days Inn Bar Harbor (no reply). Arriving in Bangor, we phoned Days Inn again, this time managing to get through and speaking to a man who said there would be no problem checking in late. Great, we said, we’ll be there in an hour.

They get fog in Maine. Pea soup fog. Wet road, dark night, pea soup fog, travelling for 16 hours already, it took two hours to make the journey, and to come around the corner and see the beautifully illuminated Days Inn Bar Harbor sight was such a relief. What was not a relief was the sign on the door. “Closed for the season. If you already have a reservation, please go to our sister property across the road at 123 Eden Street”. It was dark, we had no idea whether 123 would be left or right, so we headed to the first place where we could see signs of life,  the Atlantic Oceanside Hotel and Event Center across the road.

 

The lovely Hannah on reception confirmed that Days Inn Bar Harbor (where we had a confirmed booking) was closed for the season. She Googled 123 Eden Street and identified it as the Holiday Inn Bar Harbor Regency … which was also closed for the season. She phoned both properties and got no reply. She then phoned Days Inn Bangor and spoke to a man who couldn’t help, said it was not his problem, and seemed surprised that Hannah would expect that someone from one Days inn would know or anything about any other Days Inn, or that she would have expected him to help us. So, we did the only sensible thing, we gave the finger to Days Inn, and booked into the rather more expensive but oh-so-much nicer Atlantic, where we now have three days of R n R to recover from the Travel Day from Hell. 

The view from our suite at the Atlantic Oceanside Hotel where we ended up after being horribly let down by Days Inn. Talk about a silver lining! Simply breath-taking.

SNOW!!!!

Canada treated us to an unseasonably early snowfall ... thank you Canada, it was beautiful.