Bicycling Maine 2015 (2) - Too Soon For Stories

Departure Date:  Friday, May 22.

Every time I prepare for a trip, I get determined to leave a clean house, an ordered life - bills paid, life’s loose strands tucked in or clipped off.  I don’t want to come back from a vacation to a filthy, disorganized house and chores demanding immediate attention.  When I return home, relaxed, content, and invigorated, I want to hold onto that feeling as long as possible.

The irony is that, as I put the finishing touches on the clean rooms and organized desk, I think, now I want to stay home and garden, sit on the deck with a good book, maybe get a start on organizing all those photos I’ve been wanting to get to for the last few years.

But we have a trip planned and it’s time to get going. 

We finally hit the road around 10:45.  We had no itinerary, just two weeks to meander along the coast of Maine.  We hoped to make it to the Canadian border.

Our training was a 35-mile ride in early April and a 40-mile ride two weeks before we left.  With just a few hills.

We carried everything we needed – tent, sleeping bags, pads, pillows, towels, clothes, stove, pots, dishes, food for lunches snacks, one dinner, and steel-cut oats for breakfast.  We’d probably spend a night or two in a motel and treat ourselves to at least one lobster dinner.  And we’d alerted a couple friends that we might drop in on them.

Living in the seacoast area of New Hampshire, we’d already explored a good part of the coastline south of Portland, and knew the riding to be superb, so superb that we saw no reason not to start out on the route that we so often took when we had a day – or even half a day – to get out for a ride. 

We took the back roads to Dover and crossed the Piscataqua River into Maine, where we rode along the river through Eliot.  There's a beautifully restored old Victorian gingerbread house along the way.  Every time we pass it a ladder is set up and the garage door open.  We’ve always just ridden by, but this time I wanted to stop, take a picture and hopefully talk to the owner.  Even with our late start, we were in no hurry, with two weeks to get to wherever we were going.

The garage was as well-cared for as the house.

We laid our bikes down and went into the garage where we could hear a power tool going, called a hello and the owner came out.  We told him how much we admired his house and was it okay if we walked around and took some pictures.  I said that he must put in a lot of work on it, there was always a ladder up.  He offered to move the ladder, and said he might as well be working on it since he blew out his knee and couldn’t play golf.  He’d been restoring the house for 22 years. 

Just a little way down the road we stopped at a ball field to use the facilities and a gentleman in a pickup truck stopped to talk to us, wondering where we were from and where we were going.  He said he was an avid bicyclist and collected old bicycles and bicycling memorabilia and lived nearby.  And that’s how it is when you are carrying all your stuff on your bicycle.  People stop to talk to you because they figure you might have a story to share.

We didn’t have any stories yet.