A-ya, Maine Was Wicked Goo-ud.
1:26pm Saturday October 17, 1997

Our trip to Maine was super. And what a deal. Janis won the tickets to anywhere in the the continental United States at the StorageTek Xmas party last year. Then I bought Apple stock just before Microsoft did and made a quick grand. That good fortune enabled us to stay at the Balance Rock Inn pictured below. Our first room's private porch can be seen at the lower left. We could walk out and go down to the shore of Frenchman Bay across the manicured grounds.

While sitting on that porch one evening I wrote some thoughts in a spiral notebook. Here they are, transcribed.

11:09am Saturday Sep 27, 1997 Bar Harbor, ME.

Janis is going to get her shopping fix. From our private deck, I can see Frenchman's Bay, just a stroll through the grounds. I can see a lobster boat pulling in a trap. Looks like a tourist equipped ship. It's circling a spot just off the shore here. I can hear a channel bell. For me, its a sound I'll associate with this place. And the crash of the waves on the stoney shore - when its quiet, that's the sound of this place. There's a raven's ruchus in the distance too. But at night, it's just the waves and the bell.

Whale watching is on the agenda today. JR & I rendevous here @12:15. Some folks we saw while checking into the trip exclaimed their joy of seeing the whales. Now we're pretty excited. The ocean, the Northern seas are so foreign to us. Last Vancouver, this year Maine. Similar geography on opposite ends of the continent. It's so fun to see all these new & strange & wonderful things. The tides had us wondering for a day. Now we know they have a twice daily cycle - high/low, high/low. There are so many other wonders here. We won't have long before we head home. This taste of Maine is but an appetiser.

We intended to write a more complete journal of our travels but it seems we were too busy. It was a very quick trip; left on Thursday Sep 25 and came home the next Monday - four nights.

Here's a picture from a nice coffee table book we picked up. You can see the location of Balance Rock Inn. There's Bar Island and you can just barely see the sandbar below the water that goes from the left tip of the island to shore. At low tide you can drive to the island. Bar Island is the summer home of public TV personality Jack Perkins. While playing "Find The Famous Person" at the airport, I said I spotted him. Janis had no idea who I was talking about. Turns out that Acadia National Park, just a few miles from Bar Harbor, is his one of his favorites. We saw a video about the park narrated by him.

Anywho, from this picture you can see where we stayed. We could walk up the beach to the town/harbor, just around the bend. We ate a fine meal of lobster on one of those piers you can see sticking out into Frenchman's Bay. Another time we launched our sea kayak from the sandbar, with a group of other beginners.