Lobstah

To get from Philadelphia to Maine, one must traverse the entire northeastern stretch of the country, including far too many miles of I-95.  We drove through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and part of Maine.

That’s 450 miles in about eight hours.

For such small states, Connecticut and Massachusetts seem to take a l-o-n-g time to get through.

But, we had an incentive to get to Maine in time for dinner:

Hell to the Y-E-S!!!  And hallelujah for butter to dip the lobster chunks in.  I ate lobstah for two out of three meals in Maine and am wondering how many meals it would take for me to get sick of yummy buttered crustacean.

On Tuesday, we saw a great big boot:

Yes, we went to the L.L. Bean store in Freeport.  That part of the day alone might just need its own blog post later on.  Among other things, the “campus” has the L.L. Bean hunting store, wherein I learned a LOT in just 15 minutes of browsing.  A lot.

But let’s get to the rest of the day.  Let me tell you about the heat.  Ugh. Maine is known for its cool summers, right?  I was under the impression that it would be 75 degrees during the day and in the 50s at night.  We packed sweaters in anticipation of this well-known fact about Maine summers.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha … whimper.  Sob.

It was in the mid-90s in Maine while we were there.  That was bad enough, but hey, we’re from the South.  We’re used to hot summers… except… we have air conditioning.  That the relatives we were staying with, however, do NOT.  Nor do they have any fans.  I am not kidding.  We got to their house after lunch and suffered all afternoon.  Even just sitting still and not moving and hardly daring to breathe meant that one sweated.  Slowly lifting a glass of water to my mouth caused me to sweat.  My clothes were utterly saturated and I could have wrung them out and used the liquid to water the garden.

Luckily, we had something wonderful planned for dinner, so we we cleaned up and changed into non-sweat-saturated clothes, dashed to our air conditioned van, and set off to meet a blogging friend of mine.  I was so excited to meet Jenn and her family and had been anticipating it for weeks.  And I think the feeling was mutual.  In fact, Elegant and Jenn’s younger daughter have been pen pals for several months, so the girls were delighted to meet each other in real life.

[Insert photos here, if I had not been so busy stuffing my face with Jenn's amazing cooking and marveling over her incredible gardens to actually take some.]

Best of all, Jen’s house had — drumroll, please — air conditioning!!!!  Suffice it to say, we reveled in their cool house and were sad to have to leave.  Luckily, Jenn and her husband Tom lent us a couple of fans for the night, which is why I am blogging at you now and am not instead sitting in a Maine jail cell waiting for the start of my homicide trial because my husband accidentally brushed up against me in the middle of the night.  Because he did and the only reason he’s alive and I’m not incarcerated is because Jenn and Tom had those extra fans, which brought the bedroom temperature down into the 80s.

I will say this, if you live in a major tourist place and have a lot of relatives visiting you every year, the best way to get them to L-E-A-V-E is to not have AC.  I was up at the crack of dawn the next day and there was no lingering in bed.  Oh no, I got up and went for a run, then came back for an ice cold shower, followed by  the fastest packing-of-our-stuff you have ever seen.  We were back on the road in record time.  Record time, I tell you.

The drive through the middle of Maine to the border was one of the most beautiful we’ve ever been on.  Absolutely breathtaking.  And I finally got my wish of seeing a moose, although it was off in the distance and not coming at our car on the highway, which is definitely a good thing.  In 24 hours, I heard far too many horror stories involving moose colliding with cars.

I didn’t take that photo, as our car was doing 65 mph or thereabouts but that’s pretty much what I saw.

And then we crossed the border into Quebec.

Surely it would be cooler there, right?

Wrong.

More tomorrow.