Welcoming our son, Blake, to Maine

We are way behind in getting travel posts published this summer because we're having too much fun traveling! So we won't be confused about when each "wandering" happened, we'll start each blog with its actual date.

August 23, 2022

We chose to make our full-day trip to Canada yesterday when the weather was better. So we decided to take a rest when the next day's forecast called for high chances of precipitation. It started raining during the night, and continued on and off most of the day. We spent some time inside the motor home catching up on business, then decided to take a drive. We drove further down our road towards the ocean to find that just a quarter-mile from our campground was a wild blueberry farm. The plants are turning red with the cooler weather that starts here in late August.

We drove down to the local dock to watch the lobster boats coming in. We overheard the conversation with a lobster fisherman that was changing jobs to drive a tractor during blueberry harvest because it paid better than lobstering. According to him, lobsters were cheaper than hotdogs. He should tell that to the restaurants that are still charging steak prices for a lobster meal. We've experienced more than once that there is a huge discrepancy between the $3 per pound that the fishermen are receiving and the $12-18 per pound that the restaurants are charging.

As we have driven around this far eastern section of Downeast Maine, we have seen this billboard on the highway. On this soggy day, we followed that arrow to find out what "Wreaths Across America" means.

A very nice volunteer greeted us at the door and explained a few things about the organization. She also cued up a documentary film that answered all our questions. Maine includes some of the biggest forests in the United States. A man by the name of Morrill Worcester has a local business that made fresh balsam wreaths to sell each Christmas. When he had too many wreaths in 1992, he decided to take them to Arlington National Cemetery to decorate the graves of veterans. He quietly continued this practice for the next 13 years. In 2005, a picture of all those wreaths went viral on the internet. With national attention, suddenly people wanted to donate and sponsor more wreaths.

From its almost accidental beginnings, Wreaths Across America has grown to an organization that will lay wreaths on veterans' graves in at least 3,400 cemeteries in all 50 states and abroad this December. The largest number will go to Arlington National Cemetery, where volunteer truck drivers donate their rigs to deliver the wreaths from Harrington, Maine to Arlington, Virginia, in an awe-inspiring parade. By 2014 they were able to lay a wreath on each one of the 226,525 graves in Arlington. Visiting their museum and learning the organization's story was a great way to spend a rainy afternoon.

It was very cloudy all day, with intermittent showers. This was our last day with our motor home windshield views overlooking the bay. We will miss this place!

A rainy day is a good time to write some old travel blogs, and make some new reservations. We now have reservations through the Labor Day weekend. After the holiday we are hoping that campgrounds will be less busy. Another great thing to do on a rainy day is face-time with our grandchildren. Our oldest son and his wife are great to call us, and we drop everything to talk to them. Our grandson is really growing and changing during this extended trip, and we are missing them so much!

After our four days in Downeast, we headed south for the first time this summer. We were scheduled to be in Bangor, Maine, to take our guests back to the airport. But those guests weren't able to come. But we still made this trip to the airport in the motor home to pick up our next guest. 

We are delighted that our youngest son, Blake, is able to spend some time with us in Maine! We are so excited to pick him up at the airport in Bangor. (P.S. All our lives we thought that this city was pronounced Banger. We have discovered that the locals actually say something like Bane-gore.)

After spending all of our time in Maine along the coast, we are heading straight into the interior of the state. Even though it is still August, we are seeing some beautiful red leaves along the highway.

We are also seeing more moose warning signs as we head into the wooded inland part of Maine. We had our eyes peeled for moose in our 66-mile drive to our next campground. We were super pumped when we saw an electric sign warning of the moose cow at mile marker 200. But alas, no moose on the loose.

We pulled into our site at Pine Grove Campground near Medway, Maine. We got the camp site overlooking the Penobscot River. Nice! While Blake has joined us several times on these motor home adventures, we have always had the motor home set up before he arrived. This was the first time that he witnessed the leveling, putting out the slides, and hooking up the utilities.

Our campground on the river has free canoes to go for a spin on the water. So we picked up life vests and paddles and had a nice evening paddle. Welcome to Maine, Blake!

The water was very calm at our put-in spot in front of the motor home. We decided to have all three of us in one canoe, so Denisa got the middle seat. We're paddling against the current first, and then we'll get to float back.

Denisa is not used to getting the view from further back in the boat.

As the Penobscot River got narrower, the current got swifter. We finally got in a channel that was too shallow and too swift to row against. So Mark jumped out in the shallow water and pulled our canoe around the river island that was our destination.

We looked up to see an eagle, welcoming Blake to Maine.

Once we circled that island, we looped back to let the river current drift us back to the motor home.

It was a picture perfect evening to be on the river, with one of our favorite people!

We played some games and fixed a nice meal before calling it a day. A nice sunset over the Penobscot River signaled an end to Blake's first day in a new state for him. Welcome to Maine, Blake!