We are still trying to follow safe practices, and we have not actually been completely sequestering in our house for quite some time, but this is our first blog-worthy, whole family adventure since Nadia’s big birthday trip. We’re in another state, even.
Maine obligingly lifted quarantine orders for New Hampshirites several weeks ago.
Aside from escaping cabin fever, we are also are planning to acclimate ourselves to Zoe’s soon-to-be new home on the U Maine Orono campus. Jen and Zoe are the only ones who have seen the campus; they squeezed in a visit mid-March just as the school was shutting down.
Before we could get there, we undertook some retail therapy, and maybe even below-retail therapy at the outlets in Freeport. The LL Bean factory outlet, Old Navy, and the Nike store all benefitted from our visit. We also managed to visit our first microbrewery of a trip that promises many more microbreweries. Maine likes its craft brew.
This broke the drive up into nice, manageable chunks. An hour-and-a-half to Freeport; a few hours of shopping; then an hour-and-a-half drive to our final destination of the day: Bangor. Aiding the drive was a very ineresting RadioLab episode about the long-term effects of the 1918 Pandemic. Did you know that both Ghandi and Hitler got career boosts from the Spanish Flu?
Bangor turns out to be charming city combining aspects familiar to us from our stomping grounds of Dover and Portsmouth. It’s a fair bit grittier than Portsmouth and a few notches hipper than Dover.
Texting whoopie pie menu and expecting a rapid response
Dinner on Bangor’s Market Square. The restaurant makes its own beer.
Bangor lumps both those places together, with an ample sprinkling of microbreweries — we’ve found four here without really trying — and a mix-in of whoopie pies.
Jen has found us a nice, central Air Bn’B apartment, and later she figured out how to text the whoopie pie bakery menu to the girls and collect their order. (I opted for the “Down Easter,” which has molasses cake and blueberry cream filling.) Jen’s a hero of this trip.
She was rewarded with a round of Terraforming Mars before road weariness took its toll on all of us.
Tomorrow we visit Orono.