My Autumn Vacation

icedog · 09-23-2008, 09:17 AM

As if I deserve it, my girlfriend and I are on vacation in eastern Maine. A friend let us use his beautiful house on Mount Desert Island. While my deservedness may be debateable, swmbo has been working full time, taking three classes and putting together a new music CD. She needs this time which extrapolates to my needing a vacation.

At the time of this writing I am listening to Dinah Washington on the stereo, reducing the beef stock I'll be using in sauce I'm making for dinner while waiting for her to be ready to leave. I don't know what it is that women require which men do not. However, there is something mystical about chicks getting out the door. We're not socializing at a formal affair. We are driving up Cadillac Mountain - Acadia National Park Maine to watch the sunrise. To ready myself for this sort of jaunt, I need only to roll out of bed, do two of the three S's (shaving is not necessary at 0400), grab my camera, get the dog in the car and go. She on the other hand needs "at least an hour". So what do I do for that hour? Talk to you folks of course.

I'll post pictures from my trip when I get home. But today and Thursday will likely be the most spectacular. The sun hits the summit of Cadillac Mountain before anyplace else on the east coast of the United States. The drive up is alot of fun for me. I have a MINI Cooper S with alot of performance improvements and it loves going really fast on twisty roads in cold, dry air. Thursday we are going out on a fishing boat.

I'll write more when we get back. Until then, has anyone else spent any time up here "downeast"?

Braddiesaurus Homarus

majurey · 09-23-2008, 10:33 PM

Yep, I'm seriously jealous. Our vacation this year was pants -- it rained 10 out of 11 days. But that looks like a beautiful area to be, even if it rained.

Have a good one!

icedog · 09-29-2008, 11:24 PM

Okay, I'm back from Maine. We drove through Hurricane Kyle the entire 450 miles home. Oddly the worst was when we got back into our home state. It was lightening and torrential rain when we hit Hartford..

The ride up was beautiful We stopped in Freeport, Maine and I took a moment to hit a place we all know and love. Basil iliked it too:

The house in which we stayed is owned by a friend and he lets us stay there whenever we like. It is a very nice house overlooking the Atlatic Ocean with 8 bedrooms, four bathrooms, two fireplaces anda wonderful porch that Basil has claimed for his own:

I like the kitchen. I picked up some slab bacon. Does anyone else love, I mean LOVE slab bacon?

We went up Cadillac Mountain to catch the sunrise. I guess that is the pllace to be if you wanna see the sun before anyone else in the USA. We weren't alone standing on the top of a mountain, in the dark, in the cold, cold wind:

The sun came up as scheduled:

Even with his sweater on, Basil was cold and confused. I don't like assigning human emotions and thoughts to dogs but I'm pretty sure Basil was concern for our sanity, or at least fairly certain that humans do stupid things for no apparent reasons:

But the early morning sun sure did look good on his reddish brown face:

I will make another entry for the rest of the pictures.

nun2sharp · 09-30-2008, 01:41 AM

I want your girlfriend, your dog and your vacation..... you bum, what a way to live!!!! God bless buddy it looks good, how about pics of the sunrise? And I LOOOVE slab bacon!!!!!

Ockham · 09-30-2008, 08:46 AM

Excellent! this is what I call holidays - and even FOUR bathrooms... the last one we had with the wife was in London in a "cheap" but quite decent hotel, but with a bathroom so tight I needed to open the shower curtain to soap my arms...

BTW my wife's dog usually has this confuse look on his face when we sing (her dog is a music lover and is known to sing also when we are listening to music, especially Alanis Morissette)

Silver · 09-30-2008, 10:23 AM

Awww poor Basil! Thank you for sharing the fabulous photos Brad, I loved the fishing ones you sent me too, very cool.

And oh yeah I LOVE SLAB BACON!!!!!!

I have a huge meat craving at the moment, we're hopefully going grocery shopping tomorrow and Spike will have to make sure I don't fill the basket with nothing but pork chops and steak, hehehe

And now you've made me all hungry looking at that photo of the bacon!

icedog · 09-30-2008, 11:16 AM

Hey, forget about the four bathrooms. The house we stayed in even has a two bedroom guest house!

Silver, do you call it "slab bacon" in Wales? In some shops we can buy solid lumps of yummyness called Irish bacon. There's a Hungarian meat market a few towns away that sells "double smoked bacon". Oh damn! I'm making myself hungry.

On Thursday we went out fishing on a party boat. It cost us $59 (or was it $57?) each. We showed up at the dock at a leisurely 0930 (as opposed to 0400) and had only to bring our lunch. The boat is a 45 foot lobster boat named Vagabond:

We went out on the Gulf of Maine and the pollock were so thick we caught our limit (6 each) in about twenty minutes. We rigged our rods with three hooks with yellow surgical tubing and a half pound sinker. Dropped the line until it hit bottom, put the reel in gear, crank it up about two feet and jig it. More often than not, before the sinker hit bottom all three hooks had fish on. It was something that would spoil someone new to fishing. I was fishing next to a great guy named Jimmy, his daughter Jamie and her husband Joey from Tenessee. They had never fished salt water before and just couldn't believe the action. In the event you think that I, Icedog would be pulling your collective leg, here are the pollock, jumping out of the buckets:

Once we hit our limit Charlie, the mate, cut some of the pollock up for bait. That kid worked very hard for us:

John, the captain, moved the boat to an island where we watched hundreds of seals for a little while. While I do love seals and all that, I felt like Clark Griswold at the Grand Canyon, "Nice...okay, let's go". The seals looked like Basil. I have always said Basil looks more like an aquatic mammal than a dog. Twenty minutes later we were jigging for mackeral and using chunks of pollock just off the bottom for cod and cusk. Scarlett (my girlfriend) caught two cusk:

I have to go out for our morning walk now but when I get back, I'll tell you about "the one that got away".

icedog · 09-30-2008, 01:38 PM

Okay, here it is. The story of "the one that got away" and it's all true.

Then we hooked into a five to six foot mako shark. It was a very cool bit of angling on the mate's part. The shark had come in grazing off the eight or ten lines baited with mackeral and pollock on the starboard side of the boat. Three times she hit folk's bait but obviously without a steel leader she just cut the monofilament and swam away, but not before we were able to see her.

It had everyone's heart pumpin'! The mate grabbed a heavy rod and reel (in the foreground in the above photo. The shark is actually hooked on theline from the smaller rod)with 50lb test mono and a ten foot steel leader. He baited the hook with a half a mackeral and tossed it in on the starboard side. It wasn't ten minutes before she hit that bait and boom! The fight began. I watched the clock as the bigger guys on the boat took turns fighting the shark. I had a big surgery on my right shoulder only fifteen days prior so I was very frustrated as I watched these guys do what a couple years ago would have been "my job". Anyway, the big fish at one point after twenty minutes on decided to charge the boat (as makos will do) and as the guy with the rod cranked furiously to take up the slack line, the mono rubbed hard against the stainless rubrail on the waterline. It was fifteen minutes later when the fish began to settle down she was alongside and I shot these pictures:

I then put the camera down and grabbed one of the boat's mooring lines to get a rope around her tail but boink! The line parted and away went that beautiful shark. Man I gotta tell ya, that was an emotional roller coaster. It's probably best that she got away. There's not much better tasting fish than grilled fresh mako steak but I don't know what eighteen tourists would have done with 400lbs of mako steaks.
After a total of six hours of fishing, the skipper turned the boat back into a lobster boat and hauled traps until he collected a keeper lobster for each person onboard. This was the absolute best day of fishing I've had in my fifty years. If anyone finds themselves on Mount Desert Island, Maine, sign up for a day on Vagabond with John and Charlie. Party boat fishing doesn't get any better.

hoglahoo · 09-30-2008, 01:58 PM

Wow! Now I want a vacation too!

Thanks for the photos it looks and reads like you thoroughly enjoyed yourselves

icedog · 09-30-2008, 06:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nun2sharp

I want your girlfriend, your dog and your vacation..... you bum, what a way to live!!!! God bless buddy it looks good, how about pics of the sunrise? And I LOOOVE slab bacon!!!!!

Yeah man, it was very good and it didn't cost me a dime! I have had enough bad luck job loss and near death sickness to warrant one single flat out great week out of the past two years. I am happy to share what I can with you folks. After all, I'd share my misery too.

So the sun did rise but because there wasn't a cloud in the sky it had no character. It was still nice to see Mr. Sun come up again. If he hadn't arrived I think all the foreign tourists (many of them speaking German) would have been ****ed off. It was funny as hell. We got there about a half and hour early and there were maybe six cars and a camper (I think my Belgian friends would call it a caravan) in the parking lot (in the British Islands it would be the "car park"). About five minutes before sunup, an easy two dozen cars rolled in followed by a tour bus full of Japanese folks. So there we were surrounded by the Germans and Japanese as we stood in the gathering light on a mountaintop on nearly the easternmost spot in the United States. I have an uncle who would have fixed his bayonet. Oh, here's Mr. Sun showing his warm and smiling face:

But here's what I really liked the best about going up Cadillac in my supercharged sports car:

Superchargers love cold air and my MINI loves twisty roads with properly banked sharp curves. Up is more fun than down. Especially considering the boss in the passenger seat couldn't see the cliffs just outside her window in the dark at 70 MPH on the way up.

She took the shots going down, specifically to post here on SRP.

icedog · 09-30-2008, 07:02 PM

Here is the reason I called the beautiful sunny porch, "Basil's porch". When we were at the house, Basie was at this game

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF1BgGaV20w

icedog · 10-01-2008, 01:35 PM

Hurricane Kyle hit Maine Sunday, shortly after we left for home. It made for a long drive in steady downpour. But on Saturday we visited a spot on the eastern shore of Acadia National Park called Thunder Hole. This is a narrow inlet in the shore cliff that reverberates with great low frequency sounds when the waves hit it. My thought was the storm surge from Hurricane Kyle would make a visit worthwhile. The park folks tell you the best time to view Thunder Hole is three hours before high tide. Tide was high at 0956 on Saturday so we got to Thunder Hole at about 0630. The waves and the noise were very exciting. It was still very dark but I caught this shot:

As we were watching out to sea for approaching waves, one snuck past us and broke in the slot (which is over my ringht shoulder as I took the picture). It hit with such force that the water came back out over our heads from behind. It felt like standing on front of a very cold, very salty fire hose. That is pretty much why this is the last picture my Kodak digital camera will ever take. At least I was able to take the little card out of it to recover the pictures.

Rest in peace little camera. You served me very well for five years.