Trippin’ Around North America

Norm Abrams and "This Old House" Heaven

October 16

Another great day of driving through roads and scenery that can only be described as New England Country. We are not on divided highways and the pace is a bit slow, but we enjoy it as we are not in a hurry.

We stopped and lingered in Searsport, the Antique Capital of Maine. We always enjoy looking at some of the things that people have kept from bygone days.


No purchases although a few stuffed heads, Deer, Plains Buffalo and Cape Buffalo caught my eye.

There certainly had to be a class distinction in the "old days" when some of these mansions were built. The fancy houses seem to be right on what was the main street. Often called High Street, to this day. Of course all the homes are not as in the photos. There are skads of ordinary and less than ordinary homes, but they are usually not amongst the Fancy Houses, usually further out of what was Town.

There is a tremendous pride of ownership in some of these places, you can sense it in the property, from fence to cupola. There is obviously a high maintenance price tag that goes along with keeping it up to snuff. Many, many homes have workers replacing clapboard, scraping and fixing leaded glass as we saw today in one place that was called Castle Mae.







The weather was great again. Tonight we are settled into a camp in the woods a few miles from Freeport, Maine. Home of L.L. Bean and Company and a myriad of factory outlet stores, as well as other attractions. L.L. Bean is a Catalogue merchandiser of upscale outdoorsy clothing and accessories, at reasonable prices. Even their catalogue is great fun to dream through.

Tomorrow we will visit them, although timing is not critical, they are open 24 hours a day every day! As in Bar Harbour this is not what Fellette and I do a lot, window shopping, but we are ready for a leisurely change in pace.

Today on the way here we had the truck serviced. I felt quite proud as I drove the whole rig right through the shop without remodelling the building or the trailer.

We passed 10,000 Ks today. Gas price is about 64c C$ a litre folks!

posted by Doug and Fellette @ 8:48 PM