The Piper is Pied

Saturday evening saw a respite from the fears of Southside beatdowns as McKeen St. hosted a short backyard set by the new Piper Perabo line-up. Sadly no footage of this event was captured by yours truly... suffice it to say it was a show befitting hoots, hollers and eventually a noise complaint delivered by the local constabulary.

Afterwards their was much chit chat and fruit flavoured smoke via the hookah circle that broke out. No drugs were harmed during the making of this friendly event.

Cheers

without much explanation.

Over the last couple of weeks I went (by bus) to Quebec, well Ste. Foy if you want to get sticky, because my folks were visiting an aunt for a week or so. It's easier to get out of the province by bus than travel within it, as it turns out. Still, there's pretty scenery in N.B. on the way up such as...
...the river by Hartland and...
...the bus station in Edmundston. Well OK, that's not really scenery... but it paints a picture, right?

On the way up, while I was in Ste. Foy, and on the way back I read:
Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

Since then I sold a box of records:
Painted a room which became my new bedroom:
and went to Odell park to play horseshoes:

Horseshoes not pictured

Canada Day

And where better to spend it? Maine... that's where.

M. and I headed down for two days and a night this past weekend... and we kicked things off the night before with an ice cream and milk shake at Skinny's just outside Mactaquac. You owe it to yourself to seek this spot out... it keeps expanding and getting weirder... having turned into a petting zoo of sorts that now includes:

An emu...


A llama...


burros... and tons more.

On Sunday we gathered some camping gear and headed across the border early in the morning. As per my wishes we stopped for breakfast at Denny's in Bangor where the excitement included a drill sgt./bingo caller head waitress, an omelette filled with steak accompanied by home fries and a large stack of pancakes for $5.99, and an unfortunate older gentleman who seemed to be suffering advanced senility, more or less prodded into a window seat by his kids, badgered with meaningless questions ("are you excited for your food? are you excited for YOUR FOOD? ARE YOU EXCITED FOR YOUR FOOD?") only to eventually suffer what may have been a slight heart attack and get taken out by paramedics. I'm sure Denny's have an ambulance on call given the size of their portions (and regular diners).

We headed further south, stopping first at the Big Chicken Barn near Ellsworth. This converted farm building houses an enormous quantity of antiques from furniture to toys to prints and maps to all things great and crappy... as well as a second floor jammed with books and magazines. It was the kind of place that a whole day's worth of digging could be structured around... we spent 3 hours and my head was swimming.

We found a place at the top half of the island that Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor inhabit and set up camp... This is the beach nearby:


..then went in to Bar Harbor to look around. Very scenic... but 96.5% geared toward tourist traffic... which means elbow to elbow people dripping with ice cream/lobster paraphernalia hovering around a downtown made up of restaurants and souvenir shops. Think of St. Andrews times 10.

The next day we mainly checked the rest of the island, hovering around the outskirt of the Park stopping to view

Fishing Villages.


Lighthouses.


Sailboats.




Cliffs.

Then eventually we went into Acadia Park proper, starting with Mt. Cadillac... a 1530 hill with an amazing panorama that, as with most amazing panoramas, was difficult to capture... but here are a few attempts:







Here is also a kinda crappy panorama video I took with my still camera:


Eventually it started raining so we headed back down.


The rain kinda followed us the rest of the afternoon and evening. We left the island as the sky was darkening... stopping at a fish and chip stand to grab dinner. This was nearby:


As we got close to Bangor the sky was very strange and wonderful.









A brief stop for a coffee and we hit the last stretch back to Florenceville. About halfway along we were unlucky enough to see a deer get taken out by a car just ahead of us... kinda bookended the Denny's incident... but alas... such is the way of the long weekend.