Labo(u)r Day Long Weekend
We had been looking forward for this trip for quite sometime. It was Labour Day holiday here in Canada and Labor Day in the USA. I had taken off on Friday instead and left office early on Thursday to start the journey. Initially I had planned to start on Friday and return on Tuesday as I was planning for holiday on Tuesday. But Hursh's re-opening of the school and his soccer semifinal match on Tuesday forced me to change my program and instead we started on Thursday evening. It worked out to be good as we did not have too much of traffic on Thursday night and while return also on Monday we had very comfortable journey back.
We left home exactly at 5:00PM and up to Hamilton we were sailing through smoothly and then we faced a heavy traffic volume. That took away our nearly an hour. But our travel beyond the bridge in the USA was very smooth. We stopped at somewhere in New York state around 6:30 PM and then we continued for quite some time. Kids were having fun while watching the movie. The DVD player was serving its purpose very well. With just one stopping I continued driving till around 1:00 AM. We were too tired to drive further. In fact we had almost completed 3/4th of the journey so we decided to stop for the overnight in a motel. It was somewhere in Massachusetts and close to Boston. The motel was one of those Motel 8 series. We were too tired and soon we went to sleep. Morning we got up around 8:30 AM and started around 9:30 after having the breakfast served as complimentary by the motel.
We reached Augusta around 2:30 PM. This time driving was more of an enjoyable trip than a "task". Kids also had lots of fun and we enjoyed a lot. Maine is a beautiful state with lots of natural greeneries and its very thinly populated. Augusta is the capital but it did not look like a capital city at all. It looked more like a small city and there are no major landmark or any sort of buildings of prominence. When we reached at 28 Blaine Avenue, it appeared to be a very old street with buildings looking very fragile and antique. The street was not maintained well too. I was wondering whether we have come to the right place or not but Seema got down and when Mayurakshi opened the door we were relaxed. We had to park the car on the rear side of the house. Once we went inside the house, it appeared to be quite a good house and kids were busy playing.
In the evening we "attempted" to go to Portland, a nearby big city. But dependency on GPS let us down as we had used one 128 MB memory card in it and Pintu had loaded map for Augusta city only on that. There was no map for way to Portland. We lost our way and we moved around on highways for nearly 2 hours and finally reached Pizza Hut for our dinner. After our dinner we decided to go to K-Mart, as Seema insisted to see the store, we had never been to a K-Mart before. There was not much to see there but Pintu bought a inflatable mattress and a Nintendo Gameboy game cartridge for Hursh. He was busy in that game afterwords.
Next day we started for Acadia State Park. The park is amazing. It took us a long drive to reach there. almost 4-5 hours. We stopped at one Lick's for ice-cream and then carried on. There was a visitor's centre for which we had to climb nearly 50 steps! But for each visitor the office had tour guides to help you decide how to go about the park depending on the interest areas. In fact they used to highlight the driving directions as well on a map. That made our life much easier as we knew that what all we were going to see and enjoy.
We stopped at one place and that offered a majestic view of Atlantic ocean. We did not enjoy much that after a while, as it was too hot to stand in the sun. We started further and stopped at another attraction. This place had a cave kind of rock holdings made by the water. The water splashing there gave us a beutiful feeling. We wanted to go clser and closer to that. Initially it appeared very risky and difficult, but slowly we made it!
At times I was worried for the kids but eventually with lots of cautioning and care, both kids made it slowly. The rocks had many imprints of dried sea plants on it which had solidiied in due course of time and since we had taken off our footwears, it caused us lots of pain. Beside the water was very cold and we could not stand there for long. It was very small version of rock climbing fo us as we had to find the rock folds to make three-point contacts, something I recalled from my old days of trekking and rock climing at Tekri, Garhwal. We had been o trekking course for almost a week under Bachendri Pal, the fist Indian female mountanieer to conquer the Everest.
We spent almost an hour or so at that point. We started for our ongoing journey within the park. On our way to the car Hursh noticed one larva and he was thrilled to see it for quite some time. Our next stop was at a sea beach. But since no one had carried swimwear we stayed there for very short time and continued. By this time evryone was hungry and we wanted food desparately. But the problem was that the restaurant was at the end of our one-way journey, called Loop Road, and if we skipped something, we were to miss forever. So our attempts were to cover as much as possible before we come to the end of our journey and stopped for lunch.
There was a very good point, I fogot what that was called but it had a small passage between two walls made naturally by the two solod rocks and water used to come in with a huge foce and velocity and when thwarted by the rocks made a loud sound and the water used to look much whiter than milk! It was an amazing site or us and we must have spent nearly 30 minutes watching that. We finally had almost covered all the points of interest by now. We headed fo lunch but not before stopping at one point of interest.
This point of attraction had some kind of some small trails as well and though not everyone was very enthusiastic about that, I pushed them to go for it. It was not a bad idea though everyone stopped in between once a couple returning from the opposite side told us that there was not something great ahead!
Next day we went to a city called Rockwood. The place was close to Augusta but we had no idea as what it had to offer to us in terms of sight seeing. We stopped near an Art Museum. Though we soon found that entry fee was substantial and enough to demotivate us to look elsewhere!
