Maine: State #45
I made it to the 45th state on my 50-state quest on Friday, 28 July 2017! Welcome to Maine!
Bruce and I met up with some friends in western Maine for a week of relaxation, fun and games in a beautiful log cabin on a pond on a Friday afternoon. (Just don't ask us about the traffic we encountered on the way here from Cape Cod.) It has been a wonderful time thus far, made even more enjoyable by sharing it with close friends.
View from the cabin's dock on Farrington Pond, ME (Bruce is in the water next to the swimming platform.)
The lovely pond is nestled in the town of Lovell, about halfway up Maine right over the New Hampshire state line and next to Lake Kezar. While that lake has many visitors and allows for motorized watercraft, Farrington Pond has few residents and we have seen only small and mostly manually powered vessels on it.
The weather was overcast on our first full day here, but the pond provided an irresistable diversion. Bruce and I circumnavigated it three times, once in a kayak and twice in a canoe. Along the marshy shores, we viewed wild blueberry bushes and several types of flowering water plants in various stages of bloom.
Water lily and flowering plants
"It's a great place to live if you eat bugs!" Such was Bruce's assessment of the pond as we kayaked past thousands of water skimmer bugs on the surface while dozens of blue, purple, and green dragon and damselflies zoomed around us. There were LOTS. OF. BUGS. In fact, from the shoreline, they mimic the appearance of rain droplets falling on the water.
Thousands of water skimmers and other insects nourish the insectivore wildlife of the pond.
I discovered that my canoe handling skills have become quite rusty over the past couple of years, so our first trip around the pond was punctuated by several bouts of uncontrollable laughter as I vocalized my embarrassment. In a lame attempt to cover up just how much my skills had deteriorated, I maneuvered the canoe in a tight circle a couple of times and exclaimed that we were doing a water version of donuts in a snowy parking lot.
Let's do donuts!
The pond is actually quite peaceful when I am not out there laughing at myself. At night and in early morning, we hear the loons call and the frogs croak. Occasionally, we have even been lucky enough to see or hear a fish jump out of the water! One of our hosts, in fact, caught a beautiful bass early one morning, which he photographed (since he knew none of us would believe his fish tale) and released before any of us were awake.
Brad's evidence of his early morning catch. (Photo courtesy B. Stokes)
Farrington Pond is a lovely location that provides peaceful evenings, living close to nature, and a great place to hang out for a while, even if you don't eat bugs.
Loons at dawn, Maine (Photo courtesy B. Stokes)