Maine - Day 5 - heading north

Grand Isle Campground
Sunday, 5 August 2018

today's route

As you can see, I drove a ways today.  Fortunately, most of the road was in decent condition so I didn't have to worry about getting rattled to death.

Before I left the campground, I took a photo across Grand Lake to New Brunswick.

pretty, huh?

As I left the campground and for a little way along the road, I saw what I thought were Sharp-shinned Hawks though the bird book is telling me they were more likely to be Cooper's Hawks.  One of them swooped down right in front of the RV to the opposite side of the road, but I didn't see that it caught anything.  I'm not used to seeing so many in such a small area.

Along the road I passed a house that had a sign in front: WARDENS ARE JERKS.  I really wanted to find out the story behind it but discretion won the day.

We stopped for a stretch break in an empty post office parking lot in Houlton and the dogs and I found a laundromat that had a sign on the door saying, No Horse Blankets.  I have to say I've never seen that one before.

I'm going up US Rt. 1, which runs just a very few miles from the border with New Brunswick much of the way north.  I'm starting to find radio stations that are French-speaking.

All along the road are potato farms and farmstands offering new potatoes.

potato fields

I could see the potato fields easily, but I could also see large fields with this yellow grain planted in them, and I have no idea what it is.  I'm guessing it's something that will help replenish the soil from growing the potatoes, but I just cannot figure out what it is.

I passed a large group of buildings with a sign that said Pineland Farms Potato & Cheese Facility.  That sounded odd to me so I looked them up and learned more than I expected.  Pineland Farms was a family operation until last year when Bob Evans sold their restaurant chain and bought this company.  According to a local newspaper, Bob Evans has increasingly invested in their line of refrigerated side dishes and sausage products and decided to  - what's the word - integrate? the food source with the food products and bought this company that grows a whole bunch of potatoes.  The cheese facility is in another part of Maine, and maybe I'll remember to go looking for it.

Presque Isle is the only town of any real size in the northern 2/3 of Maine, which isn't to say it's big, just bigger - it has just over 9,000 people.  I keep feeling a little whiplash because I remember Presque Isle just outside of Erie, PA, and it was nothing like this.

Continuing on Rt. 1, I passed a sign pointing me to the site of the 1st successful transatlantic balloon flight, which was in 1978, surprisingly - I would have thought it was much longer ago than that (though now that I think about it, that was 40 years ago and there are a whole bunch of tax-paying, voting people who were born after 1978).  This attempt, number 14, left near Presque Isle and landed very near where Charles Lindbergh did on his successful flight.

I keep seeing Jehovah's Witness churches and keep being surprised by that.  They don't grow on every bush, but they seem to be more common in northern New England than Methodist churches do.

I passed a sign commemorating Maine's Historic Swedish Colony, which I also hadn't expected, so I looked it up.  Check out maineswedishcolony.info/aboutcolony.html.  It's pretty interesting.

At Van Buren, Rt. 1 takes a left-hand turn and runs along the St. John River, the border with Canada.  At each place where there's a town in the US, there's a corresponding town in New Brunswick.  Before the line was drawn at the river, the towns were joined because they were settled by the same people - they just lived on either side of the river, as people do in any city that has a river running through it.  On the US side, most signs are in French as well as English.