Leaving New England….

Yesterday we started on our journey home and naturally the weather cooperated nicely and we had a rather beautiful sunny send off as we motored out of North Conway. The day before was another thing all together….

Sunday we drove to Portland and then on to Freeport Maine, and the weather was just shy of abysmal. It was raining the entire time, and not always the quintessential Seattle rain – I think the area wound up getting close to 4 inches of rain on Sunday. It was still a good day, just not what we were planning for originally. We hit Freeport about 11:30 or so and when I pulled off the freeway I was dumbstruck by a ginormous building with a big-freakin' globe in it! Holy crap – it's DeLorme! Or something like that as we whizzed by it on our way to the Visitors Center.So needless to say I went back, geeked out on maps, bought a few and a huge mouse pad map of the world.

The Map Store is very cool, with a absolutely huge globe in the middle of the entry way to the building. In fact Eartha is 3 stories tall, and the largest globe in the world. It was really odd actually standing next to this spinning Earth as everything seemed weird and out of scale. Australia seemed way too big as it came around, but it was about 8 feet across and right in my face. If you ever get there, go see it: it's very cool. They also had this big-arse Indian by the road leading into town. WTF? I have no idea why…. maybe I will see what the great oracle Google has to say when I get home.

After that we hit the Freeport outlet district which is this massive, sprawling town of stores, shops, cafe's and restaurants.  We went to LL Bean first (naturally) and I bought a nice Marmot lightweight rain jacket, but other than that it was just plain nuts. There was some hunters expo going on so it was insane. We meandered around a bit, but the rain sorta killed it so we left after 3 hours or so.

The trip back through Portland was even more rainy, so rather than stop we just pressed on and wound up taking the scenic route along a lake and a Golf Course in some little town along the way. I have to say the houses out here are amazing. There were a gazillion beautiful old homes along this route, and I have no idea what these folks would do way the hell out here – although realistically we were only probably 45 minutes away from Portland, so some of them most likely commuted into the city.

Other than getting hosed by a couple Tropical Storms, we are having a great time. But I guess I need to get off my Mac and hit the road for the last leg home….