Ellsworth (Sept. 5)
Despite doing several chores in the morning, we got off to a reasonable start. The weather turned quite warm and humid, but the onset of autumn is evident as we are seeing trees with autumn color.
We are pausing for a few days en route to Canada to visit our nephew Jake (Jill’s brother) and his girlfriend Rebecca. They both graduated from U. Maine in May, and have been living with their two dogs in an RV in Ellsworth while she pursued an internship with Jackson Labs in Bar Harbor. This is the last week of the internship and they will move to Arizona in a few weeks.
Jackson Labs provides a large proportion of the mice used for genetic research. Bar Harbor is in the middle of Acadia National Park. Between the lab and the tourist trade, the cost of living in Bar Harbor is horrendous and so is the traffic in and out of town, including both tourists and people who work in town but cannot afford to live there. (This might sound familiar to our friends in State College, New York and San Francisco.) Rebecca spends about 3 hours daily on her commute. Jake found a job in Ellsworth which fortunately is only a few minutes away.
In any case, Jake returned from his job as we were setting up, and so we met the two dogs – both small and a bit temperamental. As well, we learned that we could leave our kayaks (with dozens of others) at the Branch Lake Campsite beach.
Because we were there on working days and because they get up ridiculously (to us) early in the morning, our main activities together were dinner. We went into Ellsworth twice – once for Irish food and once for Mexican. Both times we had nachos, but I am sorry to say neither restaurant is in the running in my “nachos across America” contest. I did think, however, that the Irish place had a nice touch using (Irish) potato chips instead of nachos chips.
The next day was rainy and windy. Neither of us felt energetic, so we stayed around the campsite until Jake and Rebecca got back from work. Then they came over and we had dinner in our RV.
Fortunately, Thursday was a much nicer day. While Jake and Rebecca worked, we kayaked on the lake. (Since Chuck always uses the sail, I will no longer note that he was sailing.) It is a very pretty lake with lots of islands, and lots of rocks just below the surface. When I pushed my yellow kayak off a submerged rock, I was amused to see streaks of blue – evidently from the last boat that hit is.
We were thrilled to see two loons and surprised to hear them chatting softly to each other, rather than making the long haunting loon call.
Jake got home in time to try the kayak sail as well. He seemed to enjoy it and is now talking about making his own kayak sail – although it is not clear where he will sail in Arizona!
Since we knew we would not be up when Jake and Rebecca left for work in the morning, we said our farewells in the evening. We expect to see them next at Thanksgiving, in Arizona where they will be starting their next adventure, and we will likely be ending ours.
Friday morning was really beautiful and I decided that we should kayaking before we left. The campground agreed that we could leave an hour after the stated checkout time and off we went. We saw 2 pairs of loons, and this “iceberg rock”.