Living Our Dream

Bar Harbor to Topsham, ME

Topsham, ME - Events of Thursday, August 22 to Friday, August 23, 2013

Our drive on Thursday morning was a little less than three hours to the southwest to Topsham, ME where we stayed at Topsham Fairgrounds. The camping at Topsham Fairgrounds is not widely publicized. There is only a brief mention of it on the website with a phone number to call for information. We found out about it from Darrell and Judy, our friends from Rainbow Plantation who are originally from Maine. Darrell and Judy found out about it from their friends, Mike and Peggy, who still live in Topsham. We were looking forward to meeting Mike and Peggy while we were here, and when we did meet with them later, they educated us on the proper pronunciation of Topsham. It is pronounced TOPS-um as though it were spelled with without the "h."

Like most fairgrounds, the camping area is nothing fancy. There is no Wi-Fi and no cable, and the electric hookups are 20/30 amps. There is a dusty, dirt road through the campground, and the sites are mostly grass.

The website indicates they have sites without hookups and sites with water and electric only in addition to about 20 sites with full-hookups, but we only saw the full-hookup sites. The sites are very close together - so close that you probably wouldn't be able to extend your awning if someone were parked right next to you on your door side. However, since the campground is not widely publicized, the likelihood of having someone next door when there is not an event going on at the fairgrounds is very low. There was only one other RV in the whole campground when we arrived. There were reserved signs on two other sites, and those signs were spaced several sites apart so they weren't too close to each other or to the RV that was already there. We picked a site at the far end.

Our site at Topsham Fairgrounds

View of the only other RV that was at the far end when we arrived

Because the campground isn't very crowded when there is no event going on at the fairgrounds, it is also fairly quiet. There is a football field located near the end where our site was. Is was used for practice several times while we were there; but practice ended at dusk, and it wasn't very noisy at all. There is local traffic noise during the day, but it quiets down at night.

We decided to stay at Topsham because it was centrally located to several things we wanted to see and because it was reasonably priced - a refreshing change from most of the rest of New England. A full hookup site at Topsham Fairgrounds is $25 a night or $75 a week.

We contacted Darrell and Judy's friends, Mike and Peggy, on Friday morning, and they suggested we get together later that afternoon for lupper. In the meantime, we took a drive later on Friday morning to the neighboring town of Brunswick just to check it out. We happened to find a farmers' market, so we stopped. There was a good variety of produce, jams and jellies, a few crafts and even live lobsters.

Farmers' market in Brunswick

Freeway was with us, and he enjoyed the opportunity to get out and check out the new smells. As usual, he left some of his own. Plastic bags - don't leave home without them.

Freeway at the farmers' market

This part of Maine's coast is made up of a series of long, narrow peninsulas and skinny islands that were created by the glacier during the Ice Age. The long, narrow bays and inlets between the peninsulas and islands are the location of many, many harbors and marinas. Harpswell is a small town on the peninsula almost due south of Brunswick, so we decided to take a drive to check out some of the coastal scenery.

One of the many bays and inlets we saw on our drive to Harpswell

Although there are some pleasure boats mixed in, the majority of the boats we saw were commercial fishing and lobster boats.

Lobster boat

We drove all the way down the peninsula and back. On the other side of Casco Bay from Harpswell is a shorter peninsula and two long, narrow islands - Orr's Island and Bailey Island. Since it was still relatively early, we decided to take the road down the other side of the bay. At the end of Bailey Island was a souvenir shop called Lands End (not to be confused with the mail-order clothing company). We stopped to check it out, but didn't buy anything.

Lands End souvenir shop

Also at the end of Bailey Island is a statue of a lobster fisherman placed as a memorial to all Maine fisherman.

Statue of lobster fisherman at the end of Bailey Island

We could also see Halfway Rock Light offshore. That place looks desolate even in summer.

Halfway Rock Light

On our way back, we stopped for a photo of a picturesque shack near one of the many inlets. The back wall of the shack was gone, and the remaining walls were propped up with boards. Stacks of lobster traps sat on the dock beside the shack, and buoys were piled in front and were hanging on the walls.

Picturesque shack along one of the many inlets

We got back to the motor home and relaxed a while before meeting Mike and Peggy for lupper. They suggested Len's Fish & Chips in nearby Brunswick.

Len's Fish and Chips

Len's has lots of seafood on the menu to choose from, and prices were fairly reasonable. Margery got fried scallops and Paul got fish and chips. We shared so we could each have a taste of both entrees. We both also got a cup of clam chowder.

Margery, Paul, Mike and Peggy

The food was good, and it was great spending time with Mike and Peggy to get to know them. After lupper, we headed back to the motor home for an evening of TV. We did our weekly cleaning chores and relaxed the rest of the day Saturday. By Sunday, we were ready for more sightseeing, so stay tuned.

Salisbury NH to Bar Harbor, ME

Trenton, ME - Events of Thursday, August 8 to /friday, August 9, 2013

On Thursday, we left Salisbury, MA in the morning and headed out on a drive of a little over 4 hours to our next destination of Timberland Acres RV Park in Trenton, ME near Bar Harbor. Bar Harbor (pronounced Bah Hahbah by the locals) is on Mount Desert Island while Trenton is on the mainland just before the bridge to the island. Bar Harbor is a well-known tourist town on Mount Desert Island, and the island is also the home of Acadia National Park.

Timberland Acres RV Park has over 200 full-hookup RV sites. More than half the sites are seasonals, but like all the other campgrounds we have seen in New England so far, all the seasonal sites have relatively new RVs and are neatly kept.

The transient sites are in the lower section in the back of the campground, which means there is little or no traffic noise. There are no trains either, and except for our neighbors who were a little boisterous around the campfire one night, the campground was nice and quiet.

The roads in the campground are paved and the pads of the transient sites are gravel. All the transient sites have 30/50-amp electric. There is also free Wi-Fi that was reasonably fast sometimes and impossibly slow on occasion. We had a strong Verizon 4G signal, so when the campground Wi-Fi faltered, we switched to Verizon.

Over half the transient sites are pull-throughs. The sites are rather widely spaced, and the length of the pull-throughs ranges from extra long to extra-extra long.

Our site at Timberland Acres RV

View of the row of sites behind us

Our friends, Janice and Dave (we met up with them for dinner at Niagara Falls), got to the area ahead of us and were also staying at Timberland Acres. We stopped over at their rig to chat when we were done setting up. One of the main reasons we came to this area was to see Acadia National Park. They gave us a lot of helpful suggestions and filled us in on a number of things to do and see. One of the things they mentioned was how crowded the park gets. They recommended getting an early start because spaces in the parking areas for all the major points of interest in the park are hard to find after 10:00 a.m.

There are free shuttle buses that run throughout the park, and that undoubtedly helps somewhat with traffic and parking. It is probably only a matter of time until private vehicles are banned altogether from at least parts of the park as is done in Zion and the Grand Canyon.

We had almost two inches of rain on Friday, which is the reason for all the puddles in the picture of the campsites above. The puddles dried up by Sunday morning. With all the rain, Friday wasn't a good day for sightseeing, so we decided to head to the visitor center to see the video about the park and to pick up a map so we could go back to the motor home and come up with a game plan. It looked like everyone else had a similar idea for a rainy day because the visitor center was wall-to-wall people.

Wall-to-wall people in the visitor center

We were able to make our way to the nice, three-dimensional map of Mount Desert Island so we could try to get ourselves oriented. Acadia National Park occupies about 2/3 of the area of the island.

Glaciers during the ice age rounded off the tops of the mountains and carved deep valleys. As the ice melted and the sea level rose, some of the mountain tops became islands. Some of the smaller islands are also part of the national park. There are numerous lakes on the island that were also formed by the glaciers, and there is a sound that runs up the middle of the island creating two lobes. The eastern lobe is the location of most of the points of interest in the national park and is also where the main loop road travels close to the shore.

Three-dimensional map of Mount Desert Island

In 1604, Samuel de Champlain led an expedition to Mount Desert Island and gave it its name. Incidentally, most locals pronounce the name Desert as though it were spelled "Dessert" with the accent on the second syllable, probably because that's closer to the French pronunciation of the name. While we're on the subject of the name, rather than Mount Desert Island, a better translation of the original French name would be "Island of Barren Mountains." Champlain gave it that name because the tops of the mountains are essentially devoid of trees, but the island is certainly is no desert. Lush evergreen forests occupy much of the low-lying areas. The mountains are bare because the tops are almost solid granite.

Having seen the movie and the three-dimensional map, and with a paper map in hand, we headed back to the motor home to come up with a list of things we wanted to see inside and outside the national park. We'll fill you in on our first outing in our next post.