Seven Days in Maine---with a film festival thrown in.

This will go down as one heck of a road trip.

Two and half weeks ago, I left my sister's place outside of Boston and headed up to New Hampshire. After eighteen days on the road, and over three and half thousand miles of driving, I finally arrived...in Maryland.

I never left the Northeastern states. I didn't cross the Maryland border until the night before last. As I told my friend Howard, that must some kind of record. What kind, I don't know.

When I last posted on the blog, I was in a Starbucks just outside Concord, New Hampshire. I'd checked into a private campground and had gone looking for dinner. It was too wet to cook. In fact it poured that night, and I found out my old tent is now a leaking old tent.

The next day I finally made some good mileage, driving north through New Hampshire, through Crawford Notch to Bretton Woods, then headed east into Maine.

I knew I knew I wanted to spend some time in Maine, but I wasn't sure how long. Turns out I spent an entire week there, driving around the state.

On the first day there, crossing the border from New Hampshire, I cut east through the town of Bethel to Dover-Foxcroft. I camped the first night at the state park north of there, called Peaks-Kenny. It was a nice state park, although you had to put quarters in a device to make the showers work.

The next day, I decided just to start heading north. I cut through the isolated wooded roads, where civilization drops off, up past Baxter State Park. I got some great views of Mount Katahdin along the upper Penobscot River. It's the kind of driving I love to do. Maine has sprinkled their highway system with many official roadside picnic areas that are great for pulling off and admiring the scenery.

That night I reached Fort Kent, at the tip top of Maine on the St. John River, which is the Canadian border, which is actually a francophone area to some degree. There were "on parle français içi" signs in a lot of the stores there. I stayed the night at a historic site there that is right in town, and run by a local boy scout troop. It cost all of four bucks. It was awesome.

Having reached the top of Maine, I cut south along the St. John River, exploring the Maine Solar System Model, which I almost forgot about and missed, until I saw Jupiter along the road just south of Presque Isle. I slammed on my brakes and retraced the road back into Presque Isle, which is where the Sun and most of the inner planets are located. I wound up driving the entire model, all the way to the planetoid Eris, which is almost a hundred miles south along Route 1. I reached Bangor by late afternoon and camped at private campground nearby.

In the morning, I headed south to Bar Harbor, which I explored a little bit, finding it to be very very touristy. I bought a weeklong pass for Acadia National Park and checked into the Seawall Campround on Mount Desert Island in the morning. It was my first at Acadia, and I spent the rest of the day exploring the island and the park, which turned out to be rather underwhelming, because it was very foggy. It felt like late fall. That night it rained at the campground, making it a rather less-than-perfect day.

Fortunately the morning was much better and I took another drive around the island and got to see the fantastic sights for which the park is known for.

The rest of that day I spent heading south along the south, through the towns of Camden, Rockland and Bath. It was a nice drive, but given that it was the height of the tourist season, many of the seaside towns were jammed with traffic. I was already missing the northern woods.

By evening I reached Portland. I cruised around it on the Interstate and headed north of the city to Sebago Lake State Park, which is on the the lake of the same name, in the "Lakes Region" of Maine. On checking in, I paid for two nights, which is very rare for me. The reason was that I had decided, while driving to the park, that it would nice to spend a day or so catching up on movies. So right then and there I decided to a "Campfest 2009" Film Festival. In the next day and half, I would see as many movies as possible in the surrounding area.