Once upon a time, before the Interstate Highway System, our nation’s roadways were dotted with something called "motor courts" — the forerunner of our modern hotels and motels. Most were family-owned and operated, and the layout was pretty much the same — a U-shaped, single-story building with the rooms (which consisted of a single bedroom and a bathroom), and a separate building with an office and restaurant. Some motor courts had separate buildings for each room.

With the advent of the interstates, motor courts have been largely by-passed, and many, like the one shown here, have gone out of business, replaced by multi-floor chain hotels with fancy meeting rooms and glitzy bars. The motor courts that still survive often now have full time residents living in their rooms, or, the motel portion is closed in favor of the more lucrative restaurant portion of the business.

Donna’s uploaded some of her “take” on our trip to Montana. The pictures are in her Flickr stream, and you can view a slide show, too.

It’s always interesting to look at pictures of the same subjects, taken by two people standing side by side. Some are almost exactly the same, and others, vastly different.

We’re back from our vacation in Montana. I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures to my flickr stream. You can see a slideshow here. Donna’s pictures, and more other “stuph” later.

Now that Donna’s uploaded a bunch of images from our trip to her flickr stream, I thought it would be neat to do a “Maine Vacations” slide show or two for you. I’m working on figuring out how to make them loop, but haven’t gotten there yet… Anyway, here are the slide shows:

Geren’s Images

Donna’s Images

Bah! We’re back. Bah!

The return trip was largely uneventful. We did upgrade our seats to “business” class at a great price. Business class on Airtran’s 717s is like flying first class on a DC-9/MD-80/MD-90/Super80. So, that was nice — and the highlight of our return trip.

The cats survived, and seem to be pretty much normal — for cats. Even Shadow was happy to see us. That’s a nice thing, since he’s been such a project cat! All of the fish survived, too, although the little “cake” that I put in the tank that was supposed to be good for about 14 days ran out!

Kiah also seems happy to be home, although I understand she had a great time visiting with Tea, The Hub, Kendi, tha Paratweeters and Winston. Tea says their house is too quiet now, with Kiah being back home.

Yesterday was spent shopping and doing laundry and generally “catching up.” Now, it’s back to the routine.

Our vacation is rapidly drawing to a close, and we spent part of our last full day sailing. We went out on a short “cruise” aboard Surprise, a Friendship Sloop similar to the one pictured, which sails out of Southwest Harbor.

The wind was blowing 15 or so when we left dock with a single foresail and our main reefed to the first line. By the end of our sail, the wind was blowing 20 to 25, with gusts considerably higher. I thought it was a great sail, but, some of the other passengers were looking a little nervous, especially when the rail was down to the water.

All of my pictures from the trip may be found here.

It was a long day yesterday, and we were too tired when we got back to even download pictures from our cameras! So, yesterday’s update is being posted this morning.

We returned to the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Railroad Museum (see our visit from last year) to ride the train and meet up with some friends who we at the National Narrow Gauge Convention.

#10 is still in fine running shape, even after several days of running convention-goers back and forth over the line.

The museum members have opened up another 700ft of track since our last visit, with another 800 feet that should be ready to go next fall. What’s truly impressive about this is that all of the building and maintenance is done by volunteers, and, they’re doing it the old-fashioned way — by hand and sweat!

On the way back to Ba Haba, we decided to make a quick right turn and go to Pemaquid Point to see the lighthouse there, and to get some dinner.

It was pretty gloomy when we got there — the first “bad” weather we had this entire week — so we took a few pictures and went into the very funky “restaurant” one of our friends recommended to eat.

After dinner, Donna noticed that the sky was finally doing something interesting, so we decided to take a few more pictures before heading back to the B&B.

Heading back, we took a “short cut” along a road that I thought would be a more direct route back to “the main road.” It wasn’t so direct, instead running in part along the shoreline. What we found was one of those quintessential Maine harbors. You know, the ones you see pictures of in Yankee magazine. Unfortunately, it was dark, so we’ll have to save that spot for a future trip.

Today, we’re going to take Donna on her very first trip in a sail boat, meet up with some friends (for dinner?) and the come back and get ready to head for home tomorrow morning.

Well, no humpback sightings today, although we did see some of the Fin Back Whales much more closely today. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get any good pictures, as the boat was crowded, and many of the people on board we just plain rude. If we go again this trip, I’ll be sure to get a spot right along the rail so no one can be in my way.

This picture is about the best I was able to get, that wasn’t blocked by someone in a blue baseball cap. There are two whales here. The closer one has already begun his (or her) dive, while the further one is just beginning to break the surface. You can see the white coloration of the jaw and “chin” area.

CBS was in town today, doing a live shot for The Early Show. They were trying to corral people over to take part in the live shots. We could hear them coaching for the “Oooh, Aaah, YAAY!” segments as we walked around town after getting our whale-watch tickets. We weren’t much interested.

Not much else exciting happened today here in Maine. We wandered around town a lot, and I took a few pictures, which will make it to the flickr stream in the morning. Tomorrow, we drive over to the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Railway Museum to meet some friends and play on the great little trains again.

Today was another fun and different day here in Ba Haba, Maine. Donna and I rented a pair of little 50cc scooters for the day, and zipped off around Acadia.

I had a Vespa-esque Roketa “Venice” model, and Donna’s was a Qlink Axon50. The Roketa was woefully under-powered — in many cases, it was all I could do to make it up the hills, while Donna powered away as if I was parked! I reminded me of the old VW Bus I drove when I was a kid!

Regardless, the scooters were a blast, and it was fun to run around the park loop road, pulling off to take pictures pretty much whenever we wanted to.

Here’s Donna in the parking lot at the scooter rental place, and, just to prove we actually went somewhere on the things, Donna took the picture at the top of this posting, and of me at one of the park entrances.

While the little machines were fun for tooling around here, it was good to find out exactly what a 50cc bike can — and can’t — do. The decision to move to get the license, and a bigger scooter was definitely a good one.

Anyway, we traveled light, with just our little point-n-shoot cameras, and had a really good time, getting some surprisingly good pictures.

Acadia is full of beautiful places like this. This is a salt-water inlet, and the water is so amazingly clear. You can see the plant-life a good 30 feet out, and probably 10-15 feet deep.

The rest of today’s pictures are on the flickr stream, as usual. In the next day or so, Donna will give her perspective on the whole scooter thing. But, whatever she says, I’ll tell you that she did have fun with it.

Tomorrow, we’re going to try to go on another whale watching run in the hopes of seeing some hump-back whales. A couple of fellows staying here told us a little earlier that they had taken the mid-day trip today, and saw two who put on a spectacular show. We know there’s no guarantee that we’ll see them, but, it’s worth a shot!

This is going to be a “reverse order” story, because the end of our day was so exciting! While sunrise was spectacular, and sunset was pretty, too, the whales were about the coolest thing going.

That, folks, is a Finback Whale. It’s called a Finback because it has a fin on its back. And we saw easily 8 different Finbacks on our whale watching trip. All I can say is that seeing the whales pop up, “blow” and dive is one of the most amazing things you’ll ever want to see on this Earth.

There’s a group of three in this picture. To the far left is one just surfacing and beginning its blow, one on the surface in the middle, and one that’s just diving down on the right.

To see the whales, we went out between 25 and 30 miles, out to a lighthouse and island that is owned by Allied Whale, a cetacean study organization, and then up into the mouth of the Bay of Fundy on this 112ft long, water-jet propelled catamaran. I lost track of how many whale, seal and porpoise sightings there were on the trip. It was worth every penny! More information on this adventure can be found here.

 Very cool stuff, and the highlight of our day yesterday. 

We also poked around the national park loop a little bit, and, after playing with a very friendly seagull, found our way to Thunder Hole, but much later than high tide. The Thunder Hole area is still an interesting place to take pictures, because of the cool rock formations.

After our sunrise trip, we spent some time in the ”Wild Gardens” looking for birds. We heard a bunch, but never saw anything more than the occasional Chickadee. I did get some neat pictures, though, which you can see on the flickr stream, along with more whale pictures and other pictures from the trip.