Thursday, August 6, 2009

My vacation with Nigel

We had a great time in Maine!
We flew out on Wednesday to Portland, Maine (with a stop over in Atlanta). The flights were very smooth and uneventful. However, when we arrived in Portland, it took them an hour to get our bags off the plane!
We picked up our rental car and drove 3 hours to Bar Harbor, Maine. This has been a vacation destination for over 150 years! It is actually an island with many small communities on it and many very large vacation homes. Apparently, lots of New Yorkers come up for the summer. It is also home to Acadia National Park - Cadillac Mountain is the highest point along the coast.
We spent 3 days there, enjoying the scenery. We walked around Bar Harbor, shopped, did some sea kayaking, drove to the top of the mountain, drove around the whole island, visited the Atlantic Brewing Company brewery (Nigel's favorite activity). We stayed in a nice bed and breakfast with some other very nice people.
After Bar Harbor we drove to Freeport, Maine - home of L.L.Bean! (and a LOTS of other outlet stores!!!) We had fun just going from store to store and spending lots of money. :-)
After the day at Freeport we drove to Old Orchard Beach. We walked down to the pier. It reminded Nigel of Blackpool in England. It reminded me of a State Fair atmosphere, but located on the beach! The was a fun fair right next to the pier. It was very interesting. We spent the following day in Portland walking along the old harbor. We visited a narrow guage railway museum, which of course had a train to ride in also. :-) We ate lunch at a restaurant called Duckfat. The make panini sandwiches and also serve french fries that have been fried in duckfat. They were pretty good! We drove over to the Portland Head lighthouse, but it was so foggy, we really didn't see much of anything. So headed back to Old Orchard Beach for our last night in Maine. We found a nice pub type restaurant for dinner - that made Nigel happy. :-)
We flew back to Memphis on Monday with a 3 1/2 hour layover at JFK in New York.
It was a very restful and enjoyable vacation. I would highly recommend it to anyone. Maine is a really beautiful state - at least the part we went to.
Here are a couple of pictures:


























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