Rediscovering Boothbay Harbor

 

A wide creek through the woods

We're staying at a motel in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. This was a bit of a consolation prize, since I had tired of planning for a couple of weeks in February, and then tried to book a dog friendly place-with-kitchen to no avail when I finally got back to it. So I booked a motel. The old fashioned kind. I think this is an American invention, that started with the building of interstate highways across the country. Those must have been heady days. . a time when we, as Americans and as a country, could agree to spend significant funds on something that benefited us all. What a crazy idea. Anyway, motels let us back into a parking space, and unload completely into our own door in a room. Reasonably sized. . .king bed, not-king-refrigerator, microwave, standard tub for a standard shower in a standard bathroom. Very wonderful, really. 

Closeup of a water plant. . I know not what. . .

The amazing thing that we've discovered in this town that we were quite familiar with 25 years ago, is that there are a bunch of Preservation areas with trails to walk. In fact, one is across a small footbridge by our motel. It's called the Penny Lake Trail. I told John that I would love to live next to something like this in our next house, so that I can take off with Jasper on early mornings to walk in the cool of morning, complete with mist and frog and bird voices, and wander about on trails for an hour or so. Jasper, of course, gets lots of smells to fill his dreams, as well as ample time and place for his ablutions. 

The woods at Penny Lake

Fortuitously, we ran into a young man who maintains the trails on our second foray, which was called Pine Tree Preservation Area. He told us about the other trails in the area that he was hired to manage. He was handsome and physical. . . exactly the kind of guy I would have fallen for as a 20-something. Well-educated, as revealed by his speech, too. He told us about other trails in the area, so we walked the Linekin Trail today, which ended in a beautiful vista of one of the innumerable bays that define the coastline of Maine. What a place.

Orange and Purple fungi

But it wasn't just about the big stuff. We saw an abundance of plants and fungi. Here is a purple fungi that I asked a friend of mine to help me identify. She thinks it's a purple coral fungus. Beautiful and strange. The other, more conventional looking fungi was cool as well. 

Tomorrow we head for the endpoint of our Maine visit. . .Belgrade Lakes. We'll get to see Sarah and John-the-younger for a week. Lucky us. As usual.

The view from Limekin Trail

A new Mantra. . or Song