Beautiful People of Bar Harbor/Hanging at Finbacks

Beautiful Bar Harbor

This was a beautiful day in Acadia National Park and driving around the island.

We've arrived!

Finally in Bar Harbor. Months of planning. Weeks of packing, Days of driving, Here at last. Glorious beauty, peace and quiet. Not to mention jobs.

Jezzibell, the rig, is almost organized and livable. The site is beautiful. Although it’s only an RV, it’s nice to not rent. How on earth did we ever find tenants in our last life? I can’t imagine renting again.

Jobs are good. Mike has found friends in the kitchen and enjoys the daily grind of banquets for conventions and cruise ships. I have had a couple of shifts serving breakfast and dinner in a beautiful dining room overlooking the bay, looking forward to training at less formal venues, schmoozing drinkers being my specialty.

We have made a few awesome meals at our place, chicken, steak tacos, lobsters… and made connections with the local pizza delivery people. Pretty good for party store pizza and heads above Providence all day.

Skoda has settled into his role as campground mascot. He has met all the staff and personally greets every new arrival, especially the 4 legged variety. The first night he was a bit skeptical of hanging outside with the bats and bugs but has decided when he is finished with outdoor lounging he just goes inside to bed, perfectly content in both venues.

We spent considerable time researching and experimenting with the wide range of mosquito control. The evenings can be unbearable without a proper forcefield of chemicals. I think we may have found a liveable solution.

On our way!

Getting out of Providence proved a bit more difficult than we had expected. (Ain’t it always so?) Rain of biblical proportions set in making it nearly impossible to get any work done on the rig. The swine flu changed Mike’s last minute class schedule, giving us fewer days to prepare than anticipated and the craziness of our landlady and her daughter went into full swing altering our sleep patterns.

Thursday night, in celebration of Mike’s final class, we sat in our backyard and enjoyed a bottle of wine and the only good weather we had in weeks. This of course prompted us to sleep in a little later on Friday when we were supposed to pick up the moving truck. Moving day was glorious, hot, sunny and wonderful, if you weren’t loading a truck. Although we had sold all of our furniture we still had two full rooms of boxes. Half labeled “For Rig” the other half “For Storage”, and a seemingly endless number of book boxes. We began at 11:00 moving items into our 17’ Uhaul. What we thought would be a relatively easy process turned out to be long and painful. Without furniture, we completely filled the truck, mostly with books.

Neighbors came to say Good-bye and to ask about the fruitcakes upstairs, and to give their condolences for our year in “Gray Gardens”. No word from the landlady upstairs, and not one pop-in from the daughter telling us “She used to be a beautiful woman”. Thank Goodness!

We moved the same weekend 5 universities were graduating, so finding a hotel in town proved difficult. We spent two gloriously quiet nights with Tom Bodett in Seekonk, MA. On Sunday before Memorial Day, we finally had finished the floor and the ceiling in the rig and loaded our items we weren’t taking with us into storage. Even though we had mapquested how to get to I95 we still got lost in Pawtucket, RI. Our 8 month joke, you can get to Pawtucket, but you can never leave, rang true on our last day. (Or as our friend Doug says, “F__k it, I’m in Pawtucket”). I managed to lead Mike, who was driving the rig long haul for the first time, straight onto a small street that had two ways out, both under low bridges and in front of the RI penitentiary. Brilliant. He managed a 3 point turn with minimal traffic back ups and only a few horns blaring and we were back on our way to the highway.

Getting on the road late, we made it as far as the Maine visitors center and found a Super 8 in a small town to get some good sleep before traveling the rest of the way up to Bar Harbor, although not the plan, probably a good idea. Finding dog friendly hotels always proves to be a problem. I find if you look for a number in the name it’s probably not the classiest of places but will take your four legged buddy.

Two Week Countdown

With only two weeks until our departure, we went to the storage facility to do a little cleaning on the rig (that's what we call our RV these days. The people at the campground refer to all the motorhomes as "rigs" and we'd hate to be out of loop in terms of RV lingo). When we opened the door to our new summer home, we were hit with a musty, terrible odor and water pouring in through every seam imaginable from the ceiling. This clearly was not part of our plan.
Since it's early in the game we decided to be optimistic and believe the powers that be wanted to warn us of the leak before we moved our stuff in and when we had time to do something about it. Mike went to work patching the rooftop while I ripped up carpeting. We also ripped out all the old ceiling panels. The odor went out the door with all the soggy materials. We went back after a heavy rain, and it seems our rain fix took and all is good with the rig.
Although the task seems more daunting than we previously thought, we are still looking forward to a summer in the great outdoors, by the ocean, on an island in Northern Maine.