Gael Glen Farm On The Road: Day 155: Passaconaway, NH to Portland, ME (and back)

We were busy today from morning to night. The is only a week left of our trip so we are making every moment count. This morning we woke to -1 degrees Celsius. Brrr! We each slept under a thick, heavy layer of blankets so getting out of our warm pocket to face the freezing morning air was a tough sell. I felt a bit crazy at the beginning of the trip packing all these warm blankets and then carrying them around unused for 5 months, but we are sure glad to have them now. In addition to the blankets, our long pants, fleece jackets, toques and mittens have come out of the back cupboards and been quickly rotated into use. It is certainly autumn here!

This morning we made our way to Franconia Notch State Park to hike the very popular Flume Gorge Trail. This place has been popular for centuries with hotels, tea rooms, and summer resorts being available in the past. The original reason to visit was to see granite rocks on a mountain face that were shaped like the profile of a man’s face. However, this formation collapsed due to natural causes (spring freeze and thaw) in 2003, and now people come to see the gorge. It was a lovely boardwalk through a gorge with the autumn leaves just starting to show their colours. The water level was low so the waterfalls were not gushing, making for a relaxing stroll along a babbling brook. We enjoyed the wooden covered bridge, the deep multicoloured pool, the placards explaining how glaciers of the last ice age deposited huge boulders on the trail, and the wolves’ den crawling portion of the trail. It was a fun morning activity. Did you know during the last ice age, glaciers reached all the way from the North Pole to Kentucky? And summers were so short that all the snow didn’t melt before it started snowing again? Fascinating to imagine. We also learned how to identify beech trees infected with a fungus called Beech Bark Disease which manifests in diamond shaped scars in the bark.

After this, we stopped to check out an antique shop and had lunch at our cabin before heading on our afternoon adventure in Portland, Maine. We drove through Conway and across the state line until we reached the Atlantic Ocean. We stopped at a farm store to check out their designer pumpkins, a huge straw horse and to buy our own lobsters. We got five 1.5lb lobsters for $8/lb. Today is the eve of National Lobster Day so we are prepared!

At the coast, we stopped for a beer and nachos and checked out the fish market before climbing aboard Lucky Catch to go lobster fishing! Yes, we made it happen. This was an educational tour as opposed to a fishing charter, but it served our purposes. We learned how to bait, set and pull lobster traps. We pulled up eight traps each with both lobsters and a variety of crabs inside. Each box shaped trap was baited with four frozen fish in a net in the middle and left on the ocean bottom for three days. We caught one or two lobsters in each trap we pulled. We learned how to sex them, measure them for legal size, and stretch elastics over their craws so we didn’t get pinched. We pulled up one female covered with eggs on her bottom and learned all about lobster reproduction. The sunset on the way back to the dock was gorgeous and we saw an almost whole moon rise above the sea.