Month: October 2023

Post by Ella. Greenville, another small Maine town, population 1500, but nudging the largest lake in Maine, Moosehead Lake, it attracts water-loving visitors from afar. For the non-claustrophobics, you can take a scenic tour by sea-plane or if you need more open space, by boat, the heritage-designated Katahdin, which offers one cruise a day, rain…

Post by Grubb. And this body of water, 120 feet down at its deepest, is not a pond. According to the locals it’s a veritable lake, Moosehead Lake, where we’re spending two nights in a Squaw Village condo bordering a golf course on a forested bluff above a beach. It’s midweek, I think. Wednesday? This…

Post by Grubb. It’s Tuesday afternoon and we’re headed to Moosehead Lake. It’s a three-and-half hour drive. Cruising up Highway 9, fall was revealing its spectrum. Red tree, orange tree, gold tree, green, full-flushed and towering, conifer branches thrusting out, connecting to the surrounding forest. I was almost ready to believe Richard Powers in that…

Post by Ella. Although no tequila was involved, I awoke this morning to a goldenrod glow seeping through the blinds. I rolled gracefully out of bed and stepped onto our balcony to soak in the early morning caw-croaking of ravens while goldenrod and purple turned to orange. We are in Greenville (we arrived yesterday late…

Post by Ella. With colorful names like mouse-ear and flying saucer, these mostly deadly (when consumed by humans) fungi populate the damp forests of Devil’s Head and Moosehorn.  Seen on Tuesday during our hikes. Mushrooms, while they might kill us, are a key ingredient in most ecosystems. They send mycelial threads down to help nourish…

Post by Grubb. Tuesday morning we woke up to marvel at the colorful sunrise on the bay. Across the water, in Canada, the lights of St. Andrews were still twinkling through the trees. After breakfast (banana for Ella, pistachio muffin for me), we drove up the highway eight miles and then stopped for a hike…

Post by Ella. We see the term “Downeast” a lot here. I have found a couple of different explanations about why this area got the name. Here is one from Down East magazine: “When ships sailed from Boston to ports in Maine (which were to the east of Boston), the wind was at their backs,…

Post by Grubb. John Wylie texted this morning to ask whether we have been affected by the Canadian fires. I mentioned that Saturday, when we were on Cadillac Mountain, I thought a mist was clouding the view from the eastern ridge. But on looking at shots taken from the reverse angle up the top of…

Post by Ella. I woke this morning to see a little tinge of orange peeking through the opening in the draperies. Yikes, I could capture sunrise for the first time on this trip. I leapt out of bed (yeah, 73 year olds shouldn’t leap), grabbed my phone and yanked open the sliding door to the…

Post by Grubb. Touring the new dimension, I’m getting used to not being thrown by the counterintuitive. As Ella covered in her blog post, waterfalls not only don’t fall, they ripple in reverse. Today (I’m guessing Monday) on our way up the coast we took a side jaunt into Eastport and discovered that although there…