Maine - Day 25 - Saco River

Yellowstone Park Campground, Sanford

Saturday, 25 August 2018

today's route

I could see from the map that there aren’t any main roads between last night’s campground and tonight’s; I also knew that last night’s campground is right on the Saco River (pronounced sack-o), and that it flows down to the ocean to the town of Saco, so I decided I would try to find roads that followed its route as far as possible.

I remembered last month in New Hampshire I visited the fish ladder in Manchester and the fish hatchery in Nashua.  They both told me the eggs they harvested were taken to Maine and released in the Saco River.  That seemed odd to me – to take fish from one state to another – but the staff explained that conditions in the NH rivers weren’t very conducive to the success of the fish and they were much better in the Saco, and who cares which state the fish are in as long as their populations are thriving.  It seemed to me at the time to be a very adult point of view.

Anyway, I decided to make friends with the Saco River since I was in the neighborhood, so I planned a route along country roads that seemed like they’d get me near the river.  They did.

I started first by going away from the river, to the town of Denmark which was a few miles away from my last campground.  I’ve only been in Copenhagen before, and only for a few hours, but I can say with authority that Maine’s Denmark doesn’t look like Europe’s Denmark.  This Denmark is spread out around the hills with a nice view of the White Mountains to the west.  I’ve found that, in Maine, when a town is marked on a map as being in a particular spot, that spot is just the general vicinity the community is centered around, and the community can spread out from that spot for quite a way.  In Denmark’s case, there were still pieces of it 7 miles from the dot on the map.

I found the river at several points along the way, and found it to be quite a decent sized river.   I didn’t bother to take any photos of it, partly because I couldn’t find a safe vantage point, and partly because it looked much like my earlier photos of the Androscoggin and other large rivers.

Even though I was on narrow country roads and couldn’t (and didn’t want to) always go very fast, I still made it down to Saco by lunchtime.  I drove only 80 miles altogether today, and the section to Saco wasn’t but about half of that.

General Dynamics has a big presence in Saco, I was a little surprised to note.

In Saco, I got lost again, as usual, because of not understanding why a road I wanted to take to the west was labeled as being to the east.  So I didn’t take it, which turned out to be a mistake.  Instead I wandered around town trying to find Main Street, figuring that would be US Route 1, because that’s what it’s called in most towns I’ve been in.  Well, it isn’t in Saco.

In the process, I found myself on a street that had a warning sign that up ahead was a bridge with a clearance of 10’5”.  This made me very nervous, because I’m pretty sure that my rooftop air conditioner makes me 11’ tall.  So I turned down the only available option, which ran right into the local elementary school.  With trees shading their parking lot and not many people around, it was a perfect place to stop for lunch and walk the dogs and regroup, i.e. try to figure out where Route 1 was.

It was a nice young couple I met when I was walking the dogs who told me to follow School St. (of course that was the name) on around and I’d find Rt. 1 no problem and they were really pretty sure there were no low bridges along the way.  So I did and they were right.  In Saco Rt. 1 is called Elm St.  Main St. is a different street.  Now I know.

A little way south on Rt. 1 I found Arundel – again, the map shows Arundel as not being on Rt. 1 at all but along the coastline, but all the businesses along the road claimed to be in Arundel, so I guess they were.  Those businesses were almost entirely antique and (self-described) junk shops, sitting at a crossroads.

I went through Kennebunk down to Wells, where I turned north.  I’d already made reservations for next Thursday and Friday at a campground in Wells and wanted to take a look at it.  I made the reservations days ago because those are my last days in Maine and I wanted to be sure I had somewhere to go, which I was afraid might be a problem since they were the lead-in to the Labor Day weekend.  I just had a feeling half the northeast would want to be up on Maine’s beaches that weekend and I didn’t want to be floundering around with no plug-in for my AC if it got hot.

That campground, though, accepted only cash, and the 2 nights would take almost every dollar of the cash I had left.  I don’t have an ATM card and there aren’t any Chase banks in Maine – as there weren’t in New Hampshire or Vermont.  I kept this Chase account as a leftover from my mom because I figured there would be branches all over the US and I’d always have access to money if I needed it (which is why I didn’t bother with the ATM card).  And that reasoning was almost right, with the apparent exception of northern New England.

Anyway, I wanted to see that campground to see if it was worth giving up almost my last dollar right before a national holiday weekend when every bank in the country would be closed.  I have to say that from the road, the campground looked very nice.

I came north on a Maine route 8 miles to my current campground, which isn’t quite as nice but is certainly more convenient regarding method of payment.  The only drawback here is they don’t have wifi.  They’ve got a service I haven’t run across before where I’d contract directly with a private company that would provide me a signal.  But finally!! I’m getting a good strong signal from my little hot spot, so I don’t need to worry about it.  I’ve got a good campsite with nobody on either side and lots of trees for shade, so I think I’ll stay here a second night as well.