by Barb in Maine, baking, shopping, wrapping, addressing cards and packing for Key West
A research trip
Last week my husband and I went on a research trip to central Maine. Normally, I’m writing about the Maine coast, but in the next Maine Clambake novella, coming in 2023, Julia and company take a research trip to central Maine, and for various reasons I decided Google and Wikipedia weren’t going to do it. There were things I needed to see for myself.
We started out from Portland the day after our first sticking snow. The sun was shining, which was important to the enterprise, since part of what I needed to see was the view. We drove along routes 295 and then 95, north and east, two hours to Bangor and then an hour more. I can’t tell you exactly where we went, because that would be a spoiler. I don’t expect any of you to remember the spoiler until March of 2023, but you know, once something is on the Web, it’s there forever.
We passed through Bangor, and Orono, home of the main campus of the University of Maine, and later past the signs for Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, then past the exit for the Allagash Wilderness Waterway and Baxter State Park. And kept going.
There’s a place on Route 95 where you come around a curve and across a lake, there she is: Mount Katahdin. I know our eastern mountains don’t impress our western readers, but she really is a beauty. 5269 feet, solid-looking as the granite she’s formed from, Katahdin is the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, just beyond the part of the trail know as the Hundred Mile Wilderness.
I found exactly what I needed and, our mission accomplished, we had a lovely lunch at a local diner and headed home again. We were a lot closer to New Brunswick than we were to Portland at that point, but if we’d turned north toward Fort Kent, there would have been a whole lot of Maine left to go. It’s a big state by New England standards.
The giveaway
In case you missed it in my newsletter, I’m giving away one copy each of Jane Darrowfield, Professional Busybody, and Jane Darrowfield and the Madwoman Next Door to ten lucky winners.
The giveaway ends tomorrow, so enter here. (US only, sorry. I could drive your prize to parts of Canada more cheaply than I can send it.)
If you prefer ebooks to print, or if you want a sure thing, Jane Darrowfield, Professional Busybody is on sale for 99 cents today only.
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