July 2020: A Socially Distant Road Trip to Maine: Day 5, The End

Day 5: Tuesday July 14, 2020

Checkout day, for real this time. No one was in a hurry to get moving. Eventually though, I headed down to get a few breakfast bags. This is the answer to free breakfast right now. A paper bag with a fun sticker, filled with a bottled water, piece of fruit (orange for all of us that day), a Nutrigrain bar, flavoring for the bottle of water (Arnold Palmer...blech), and a carb treat. 3 of us got blueberry muffins. Kim lucked out with coffee cake. And this Hampton Inn doesn’t cheap out on water. The good old New England favorite, Poland Springs was the bottle of water. Phew!

I was pretty content with my breakfast bag, but Nick’s favorite part of vacation is going out for breakfast, and obviously, we hadn’t done much of that. So he was put in charge of finding a breakfast spot for the 2 of us.

We ended up at The Galley, which was clearly a local hangout. The single waitress clearly knew most of her customers. Nick got some ridiculously large plate of meat, eggs, pancakes, etc. I got an amazing pineapple muffin (grilled) and an egg. It was all delicious, and it was very inexpensive.

Once we were done with breakfast we met back up with Kim and John. We walked the main street (Front Street?), visiting a few stores, and then we walked part-way across the (large) bridge that crosses the Penobscot River, so that John could point out the ship in the shipyard that he’s been working on camera systems for.

After we returned to ground level, we parted ways and headed for the car. It was time to get on the road. We hoped to stop in Freeport at our favorite whoopie pie store (Wicked Whoopies...go there when you’re in Freeport; it’s way more exciting than LL Bean!). However, the first several miles of our drive were pretty eventful. We passed a wild accident scene where a Rav-4’s back wheel had landed on the hood of a Hyundai Elantra (word from the Brunswick PD facebook page is there were no serious injuries). Shortly after, the sky opened up, and the monsoon was on-going through Freeport, so no whoopie pies this trip.

Thankfully, the rest of our drive was mostly uneventful, and we got home about 2:30, where we unpacked the car and then picked up the dogs from the pet resort. It must have been an ok stay for them, because Gizmo only gave me the silent treatment for about 12 hours. Our record is a week.


Final thoughts:

The trip ended up being less unconventional than I had expected. And it was thoroughly enjoyable. It felt so good to get a change of scenery.

I’m super impressed with Hampton Inn’s response to the pandemic. Even Kim felt very comfortable there.

This will not be our last visit to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.

Even after 4 nights sharing essentially oversized hotel rooms, I still like my in-laws.

Nick and his parents all thought the Sheepscot Resort was weird and wouldn’t book there again. I’ve stayed at far worse RCI resorts, and I didn’t find any major faults with it. And quite frankly, I loved the view and location.

The rest areas on 95 in Maine are taking social distancing seriously. Only about ⅓ of the bathroom stalls are open for use, half the sinks are closed, and you can only use hand dryers away from the sinks, not the ones at the sinks.

Online booking beats over the phone booking…

Sunglasses fog with a mask. A good hat with the mask is a much better option for keeping sun out of your face when touristing with a mask.

July 2020: A Socially Distant Road Trip to Maine: Day 4

Day 4: Monday July 13, 2020

Today everyone got up and moving relatively quickly. My FIL, despite being an electrical engineer is pretty anti-internet, so when he books things, he books them over the phone. And being an engineer, he’s not always the clearest communicator. So...what happened? Well, we ended up with a checkout day that was the day before we had all planned on. So, on this beautiful day, we were checking out and relocating for the night. Nick and I found out these details the day before checkout. But...before the packing started in earnest, it was necessary to take in the view. Obviously, on the day we checked out from our unit with a stunning view, it was finally not foggy in the morning. And yes, the structure to the right is the bridge we hiked over to get to Red's for dinner the night before. I also took a few pictures of the room, because that’s what I do. It was a studio that sleeps 6, with 2 queen beds and a sleeper sofa. Apologies for the mess. It was checkout day.

We did a remarkably good job of packing up and moving out, and Nick and I reached our first tourist destination of the day just about 10 am, an hour after leaving the Sheepscot Harbor Village Resort. We thought Kim and John were ahead of us, but turns out they weren’t, so they finally arrived about 10:15.

What was today’s destination? Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse. Kim and John had tried to go here on a previous trip to Maine, but it had been too foggy. Now I like lighthouses, but this one wasn’t high on my priority list. I like the ones where you can look at them from a little distance from a park or something, where they actually look like a lighthouse. This one required a bit of a walk. And even I hadn’t realized just how much of a walk.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking. The long and short of it is that to really see Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse, chances are, there will be swearing involved. You walk ⅞ of a mile across a path of piled granite dodging the occasional pile of seaweed or puddle from a rogue wave, to reach a lighthouse that is so far at the end of this “walkway”, that if you reach the end of the walkway, you can’t actually tell it’s a lighthouse from looking at it. Then you walk back, stumbling over the unevenness, because chances are you underestimated how much water you need to walk across water. 

We did it. Nick and I won’t be going back. Once was enough for that one. And it took an eternity, so I mentally moved the lighthouse I had hoped to also get to that day to the “next trip” list.

Once back at the car we guzzled water, I switched from my sweaty Keens to flip flops, and Nick found lunch options on Trip Advisor while we waited for his parents. His mom was more excited about what we had just experienced than we were!

We drove about a mile to find lunch at Claws. Claws popped up on Trip Advisor as the number 1 place in Rockland for “quick eats”. It’s another order at a counter place, but a little bit bigger than Red’s, with a couple of covered seating areas, and a decent view. The menu is sizeable, as are the portions. Kim got haddock tacos, John got a burger (yeah…), Nick got a double order of shrimp, apparently not noticing the warning that the double order is “HUGE”, and I got a fried haddock sandwich, that they apparently used a whole fish for. The food was all awesome, and so was the homemade lemonade. If you are in the Rockland, ME area, eat at Claws!! And yes, those painted lobstahs are social distancing markers...Maine!

While eating we discussed the plan for the rest of the day. In light of timing, where we were, and the fact that we were checking into a new place, we decided, as I had thought, to skip the next lighthouse and head back into Boothbay Harbor to explore some more/return to some stores that we had skipped over or rushed through on Saturday. It was about an hour drive. When we got there, we did some shopping and got some ice cream on the pier again (strawberry cheesecake ice cream for me this time; yes those are actual cheesecake chunks in the ice cream), because the Ice Cream Factory is amazing! 

And then split up for the drive to Bath, me stopping for some clear-day pictures at the footbridge before getting in the car. I was in no rush.

Eventually Nick and I hopped in the car and made the 45 minute drive to the Hampton Inn in Bath. Now I’m a fan of Hampton Inns and have always found them to be incredibly clean. I didn’t think they could get much cleaner. I was wrong. Don’t hesitate to stay at a Hampton Inn during this pandemic. Your door will even be sealed with a QR code to tell you all about their cleaning strategies...

Whoever Nick’s dad had talked to in the call center had led him to believe that the 2 queen room he had booked would be a suite, but I had looked online, so I wasn’t surprised to walk into a standard 2 queen room. Hey, we all still like each other!

Pretty soon after our arrival, Kim and John convinced me to walk over to the park across the street with them. John parked himself on a bench with a book, and Kim and I hung out by the “pond”. It was a nice enough park. 

Eventually it was time to figure out dinner. Nick got on Trip Advisor again. We had a few false starts, because it’s Monday in Maine, and Monday in Maine and NH often means closed restaurants, because small businesses are our primary businesses, but eventually we ended up deciding on Bruno’s. It was a short walk from the hotel.

Bruno’s was great! We sat, the service was fantastic, and the wood-fired pizza was delicious. Nick and I split a bbq chicken pizza, and there were no leftovers! It was a great dinner to wrap up a great vacation!

Back at the hotel we all crashed early.