Hello and welcome to our blog. Our story starts back in 1969 when my parents bought a house in Lincolnville and I fell head over heels in love with Maine. We had to sell it in the '80's because my parents got divorced and neither of them wanted the responsibility of maintaining a house more than 400 miles away. Fast forward to the early 1990's... That's when I introduced Maine to Tommy. I was a bit deflated when his first reaction was "What the heck do you even DO here?" because I'd expected him to get bit by the bug at first sight. We'd arrived at night after an 8 hour drive from NY. No, it was actually longer because we had to drive from where we were living at the time in East Hampton, picked up my mom and grandfather in Brooklyn and then drove here. So it was more like 12 hours with all the pee stops (my grandfather was having prostate issues at the time much to my horror because I did not want to talk about my grandfather's prostate. I didn't think he even had those parts because he's my grandfather and seriously...). Anyway it was a long drive and I'm quite certain we also stopped at "Beans" (LL Bean) because we always stopped at Beans. I'm looking forward to writing my Beans blog later. Back to the '90's. We got to the Midcoast well after dark and if you have ever driven to Maine from anywhere other than Maine it feels like it takes forever and then you hit Route 1. Which takes another forever. We finally made it to Route 90 which is like the home stretch and we're motoring along and then all of a sudden the black top (hold that thought Mainer's, I know it's HOT top but we will get to different words for different things) stops and it's a dirt road. Route 90 is never a dirt road, or so I thought. The road just stopped and it was pitch black and we had no warning and Tommy had already been driving for 11 hours and 45 minutes and this was the icing on the cake. "What the F...?!" was his internal reaction that thankfully didn't come out of his mouth because my almost 90 year old very proper grandfather who happened to be funding this trip was in the back seat being well mannered and perfectly content with his New York Times that he'd been reading the whole time with the light on. Which didn't help, by the way. Seems summertime was the appropriate time to rip up a major roadway with no warning. Long story short, sort of, somehow we made it to the house on Megunticook Lake that we were renting for the week. I say somehow because that was before the time of GPS and we were doing this by memory. My mom never drove and didn't know how to get from point A to point B because she didn't care. She was always the passenger and was either reading the paper (always the NY Times) or tapping her pointer finger on her window saying “That House” which we all knew meant that was the house she wanted to buy one day. I also never drove in Maine because growing up in Brooklyn I had no reason to get my license until I moved to East Hampton and had to or I'd be stranded like my mom always was and I vowed to never be like her. I was in my 20's. Who wants to be like their mom in their 20's? So neither of us had a clue how to get where we were going but I guess we saw enough landmarks that we recognized and squirreled our way through the winding roads to the “Lake House” on Beaucaire Rd in Camden. It was dark and we were all tired and cranky so we chose our rooms, dropped our bags and fell asleep before our heads even hit the pillows. Then it was morning. In Maine. On a lake. And the magic sets in. The way I remember it is we all woke up at around the same time. Tommy and I had a downstairs bedroom with windows a little high up so the views were obscured a bit. The magic was going to happen upstairs. Up we go, still tired and a little cranky from the looooong drive but there it is. Through the wall of full glass sliding doors with the morning fog hanging over we get our first look at the view that still, to this day, takes my breath away, Megunticook Lake. To be fair to the other lakes in Maine most of them are breathtaking but Megunticook is where I spent my childhood so it holds my fondest memories but in watching Tommy's reaction to seeing it for the first time I know it had the same effect on him. There was a row boat tied off to the dock and a fishing pole in the shed. Coming from a long line of fishermen, Tommy knew just how he was going to spend his first day in Maine. It was hours before we saw him again and that was fine. I settled in with a book, Mom was spending her time cutting wild flowers from the roadside and Bernie (we always called him by his first name which I now know is a little weird) was still reading the NY Times. Must have been the Sunday edition. The house was filled with only the sounds of the loons calling to one another, the coffee brewing and the over-sized pages of the Times turning and that was just perfect because...well...Maine.
Thanks for stopping by. We want this blog to inform, inspire and educate you about Midcoast Maine. If there are topics you want to hear about please drop us a line, we'd love to hear from you.
Warmly,
Tommy and Alex
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