Portland to Portland

So if you ever think that an overnight flight is a good idea, because you can get your sleeping and flying out of the way at the same time, it's not. You can't do that and you're an idiot for trying. You just trade sleep for this weird, surreal experience in a noisy tube where time has no meaning and. since all of the windows are closed you could as easily be in the back of a moving semi as flying cross country. And when you get off everyone acts normal like there wasn't a day out of time that you spent abducted by aliens.

Anyway, I flew to Maine.

This is where I live now

Upon being picked by the inimitable Ms. Sarah, I embarked on the three hour trip from the lesser of two Portlands to the coastal fishing village/hippie college town/rich white person preserve that is known as Bar Harbor. The trip is actually quite nice.

The crappy little towns of Maine are the nicest crappy little towns anywhere

And then I went to bed. Because the first paragraph in this post.

Anyway, when I got up the next afternoon, I decided to dig out my running shoes and go see some of rural coastal Maine, because I have started to grow what appears to be a viscous layer of custard around my abdomen.

Maine is beautiful, but...different to run in than New Orleans. For one thing, there's hills. The total elevation change on my jog was probably less than a hundred feet, but that's still about ninety six feet more than my routes in NOLA.

The face of fear

Also, sometimes you just find the ocean. Like, you turn a bend and there's the edge of this continent.

Helloooooo

Also, yes, I got lost. Asshole.
I had my phone with me for pretty much this exact reason, but it turns out that GPS doesn't work here because it's Narnia. I was pretty confident that I'd get somewhere eventually, because it's a pretty small island, but that's not to say it was easy.

Maine, you are not as helpful as you think you are

 Anyway, after finally completing the loop that I had thought the trail actually did (spoiler alert- the trail wasn't actually a loop) I made my way out of the Blair Witch set and back onto the road. It was only then that I remembered that, quaint as New Englad is, it's still the actual wilderness with actual bears and cougars and I hadn't really been paying much attention. As this thought idly sauntered through my mind, I looked left off the road and spotted

Why are all wildlife warning signs I encounter clearly laserprinted in a home office?

...A sign warning of carnivorous whelk and the neurotoxins of local invertebrates. Because Lovecraft apparently had a good goddam reason to write about New England all the time.

Anyway, today is spent in town proper, far from the unexpected dangers of the country's most gentrified wildlands.

But not safe from leafpeepers