Having spent the majority of our financial and emotional resources in our whirlwind tour of New England, the second week was spent at a much more leisurely pace. We made a firepit in the back yard of the ridiculously charming New England farmhouse Ms. S rents the top floor of from beachstones and large rocks liberated from state built spillways and christened it with a wide variety of local microbrews. Later, we went on a boat again.
They didn't let me drive this one.
It was a three or four hour cruise, detailing the eccentric history of all the insane mansions on the island and their insanier owners. Bar Harbor, as I have mentioned, was originally an offshore playground for the insanely rich of the turn of last century that had no access by car or foot until the 60's- if you didn't own a yacht, you weren't welcome. It's the place Gatsby would come to get *really* weird. Now, while it's still class-rage incitingly wealthy, the glory days of inexcusable wealth have faded, leaving a long row of dilapidated lunacy memorials. Some of these houses are built in English style, some in Egyptian, some in castle. One was protected by a fifty food sound barrier, so the owner could throw a party without hearing all the other parties. Rich people are weird.
Later, we re-christened the fire pit. You gotta do these things right if you want them to stick.
Hiking was also a major theme of the week. For a small place, Mount Desert Island (home of Bar Harbor and named, in the typically literalist fashion of the northeast, after a mountain that no one lived on) boasts a wide variety of impressive and challenging hikes.
Let's talk about New England hiking for a moment.
I want you to keep this image in your mind
Remember a few posts back, when I was (predictably) lost on a run and found the least helpful sign in the world? Turns out that was merely a warm up for the rugged individualism our gentile yankee countrymates expect from even the most casual of outdoors enthusiasts. Between the picture above and the one below, can you guess which is an officially sanctioned trail?
And which is a site scouting photo from Blair Witch filming?
Sucker! They both are! When the BLM of Maine thinks to itself "we should make an area accessible to humans to preserve the rest of the woods, and allow them the experience of nature" they come away with the same mental images most of us reserve for "scenes from Into the Wild".
Yes, trimming the tree is easier than installing a sign. But it's the principle
How could we possibly follow such a subtle, minimalist trail, you, my hypothetical readers demand in your thousands? There where signs!
Safety is here used with scathing irony
This is what was to the left of that sign. No, seriously- this is the sign-worthy path.
Eventually the trail, as best as we could tell that it was such, gave up all pretenses of helpfulness and ran to a shear cliff face. It wasn't the end of the trail, mind you- just the horizontal portion.
Once again, not a joke.
After wandering in the woods long enough to seriously consider if my foot speed was high enough to catch a squirrel (unlikely) and whether I could best it in single combat to create a meal (almost certainly not) we finally reached the culmination of what was so ambitiously labeled a "trail". I would say it was worth it.
Like, I guess.
After a week of low key exploration (both physical and libational) of America's far east, it was time to board the final plane in this trip and head to the cardinal inversion of the northeast, America's vast, arid, and surreally racist southwest. Sarah is, as always, a stalwart of awesome, and Maine is quietly, insistently glorious, and I can almost understand why the 1% would try to carve out a private Narnia here. I'm just gonna leave you with this.
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