Maine - Day 26 - western Maine countryside

Yellowstone Park Campground

Sunday, 26 August 2018

today's route

I figured on a sunny Sunday, the whole world would be down at the Maine beaches and I definitely didn’t want to be among them, so I decided to explore the small inland towns in this area.  I’d heard of a winery in Lebanon down the road a few miles, that was only open on Sunday afternoons, so I figured that was as good a destination as any.

With some time to spare in the morning, I drove over to the NH border, which is only 14 crow-flight miles from here.  But I didn’t want to follow the crows; I wanted to sightsee.

I should say right way that I only drove about 65 miles all day, even though I covered maybe 5 or 6 little towns and a fair amount of countryside.

I went first down to South Berwick (passing through North Berwick) and found a really charming little town.  You can see on the map it sits almost smack on the NH border.  In fact, all day I think I saw at least as many NH license plates as I did Maine ones.  Actually, all along the Maine coast I’ve been seeing so many Massachusetts plates it hasn’t always been easy to remember which state I’m in.

downtown South Berwick

Cummings Mill Apartments

But back to South Berwick.   I’ve got a photo of the downtown – the whole one street’s worth.  I found a parking place and took the dogs for a walk (you’d think they hadn’t been out in a month, the way they were acting), and we found ourselves at this building, with a sign saying it is the Cummings Mill Apartments.  But I’m getting used to looking at mill buildings now and was sure it had once been an actual mill.  Sure enough, I found online that from 1872 to 1990 it was a shoe factory.   At its height it produced 5,000 pairs of shoes a day and employed 350 workers.  That’s a lot of workers at any time, and I imagine the region wouldn’t mind having that many jobs back again.  But shoes aren’t made like they used to be.

North of South Berwick I found Berwick.  Surprisingly, it doesn’t look nearly as prosperous and I’m guessing hasn’t figured out how to reinvent itself as well as South Berwick has. But surely that will come.  It’s just not there now.

Berwick and South Berwick sit on the Salmon Falls River which, I hadn’t realized until today, is the dividing line between NH and Maine and what makes the lower boundary deviate from the otherwise totally straight line that forms the rest of the western boundary.  See that little squiggly bit way down at the bottom left?  That’s where I spent the day.  That map shows Sanford, which is the town my campground’s next to.

I wanted to find the Salmon Falls River but couldn’t see any county or state roads on the map that would get me along there (as opposed to crossing it into NH) so decided not to pin my plans on being able to turn around on some wildly narrow country road.  Yeah, well, as it turns out I had to do that anyway later on.

So I abandoned the river and drove north to Lebanon where the winery was supposed to be.   Note my phrasing because I never did find the winery, or even a sign directing me to it.  I once again trusted online directions – both from the winery’s website and from Google – and they both lied, as far as I was concerned.

I drove up to US Rt. 202 in Lebanon, as directed, located the correct road by not following the directions but by following an online area map instead, and then got to an odd intersection that neither set of directions mentioned.  The intersection consisted of the road I was on; a crossroad that went west to Rochester, NH, and east to nowhere I could identify; and 2 roads straight ahead, neither with clear labels.  I chose the road more-traveled (with apologies to Robert Frost) because I figured a winery would be more likely to be on a 2-lane road than a 1½-lane road, plus a man in another car (who stopped to tell me I was a long way from home) said that’s the way I should go.  So I went.

And went and went for miles and miles and finally started to think that if I went much farther I’d be in New Hampshire and anyway why had I not seen any sign whatever for this winery when I was sure I was in the vicinity – and then the road forked and both forks looked equally likely – and equally unlikely.  And since the fork was a big enough intersection to turn around in, I turned around and went all-l-l-l-l-l the way back to that intersection, and finally saw the street sign telling me the street I wanted was the 1½-lane one.

So I started up that one, and almost immediately I saw a sign saying it wasn’t a through road.  Well, okay, I thought, so it would stop at the winery and there would surely be a parking area there.  The online directions said the road would be unpaved and I so far hadn’t encountered any unpaved roads, but I quickly wished this one was unpaved because the pavement was so broken it was horrible to drive on.  My poor little home was rocked like crazy with each gaping pothole, and the road was too narrow and too broken up for me to avoid them.  And then the road started going uphill and got narrower and narrower, and I got nervouser and nervouser.

And then up ahead I saw a US Mail truck – on a Sunday (let’s hear it for contracts with Amazon, no matter what the president says) - which was turning around in a driveway, which I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to do.  At that moment I was sitting at what you might call an intersection, since there was a labeled road going off to the left, and I decided enough was enough and I gave up trying to find that winery and turned around at that semi-intersection.

I never could figure out where I went wrong.  I mean, I didn’t go wrong since I found the road the directions told me to find.  No idea.

Sanford's currently unused mill

I drove on into Sanford, looking for a place to stop where I could walk the dogs, because I’d promised them they could walk at the winery and they were overdue.  And I found a nice

Sanford's waterfall

little park by the town’s waterfall/electricity source.  In fact, it was what made the town a long time ago because it provided the power for the Sanford textile mills.  That sign should have had some proofreading before it got cast, but it shows the town’s civic pride.

From Sanford, I drove the 4 miles farther down the road to Alfred – just to see the town of that name, which it turns out is a pretty little town.  On my way back to the campground, I stopped at the Shaker Pond ice cream parlor (I figured I deserved ice cream after that drive), and learned later that Alfred is the home of this ice cream.  Which is really good ice cream, by the way, if you ever happen to be in the vicinity.

My current campground is growing on me enough that I've decided to stay here the whole week, and get the reduced weekly rate from then while not paying my last cash to that other campground.  This campground agreed, and the cash campground said they hoped I'd stop by another time.