Bar Harbor to Wiscasset
I had too much coffee after my lobster last night, so I fidgeted all night and neither of us were best prepared for our early rise, so we could make our whale watching trip. We managed to leave the motel at 7:45, or at least some time almost as early. We were late for the 8:15 arrival time we'd been advised to make, and I was a little crabby about that. As it turned out, there was plenty of time. Cruise operatires LIE TO YOU.
We filed onto the boat and got some bagels from the "mess" straight away. In the event this wasn't such a good idea.
As our three-engined catamaran sped into the Gulf of Maine, we became queasy. Debbie became paler and paler, and I went to find her a sick bag. I found a cache of them at an occupied table. Just as I reached out to grab one, the boat lurched and I stumbled onto the table. The woman recoiled, quickly grabbed a bag and thrust it at me, before I reassured her it wasn't for me.
Debbie filled a couple up, then staggered to the restroom to tidy herself up. She felt less humiliated when she found that the lower decks resembled the scene in Stand By Me where a pie-eating contest turns into a mass barf.
I saw four spectacular finback whales while Debbie sat very still, uninterested in anything but her own suffering. Then a crew member advised us to move lower down, where the ship moved less. The journey down gave me the impetus to fill a sick bag of my very own.
On a lower deck, we both felt a lot better, and Debbie got to see (and enjoy) two more whales. I was too slow to get any decent pictures of the whales.
We then spent 14 weeks lost at sea without food or water, drinking only our own urine and the sodas from the mess. One by one, passengers were selected by drawing straws, and eventually by a lucky twist of fate (for us) everyone but me, Debbie and the crew had been eaten. As the next drawing of straws drew close, we were considering mutiny (but also eyeing up the choicer cuts of flesh), but just as Midshipman Hiram "Pegleg" Cremola proffered his handful of straws, Debbie spotted the Porcupine Islands on the horizon and exclaimed "Land Ahoy!". We were elated, although Hiram looked a little crestfallen and sloped off with his distinctive "shuffle-thud-shuffle-thud".
The temperature difference between dry land and being out at sea is incredible. At sea we were chilly in long trousers and windproof jackets. As we approached the harbour, we could feel the hot wind coming off the shore, like opening an oven.
Back on dry land, we popped into the T-Shirt shop for that shirt I regretted not buying yesterday, then got back in the car and left Bar Harbor behind.
For some reason, our vomit-emptied stomachs were craving Burger King, so we stopped at one in Elsworth, then continued along the Maine coast on US-1.
We ended up in the prettily named Wiscasset., where, exhausted, we checked into a motel. The TV had an unmanned TV station available, on which synthesised voices read out marine weather reports. The image on screen amused me:
We've got another day in the USA, then the next day we fly home. We decided now was a good time to consolidate all our junk treasure and work out how we're going to get it home. It's actually not as bad as we feared.
At about 8:30 we went out looking for food. We drove for 20 minutes in the direction we'd been going, and found nothing but darkness -- and the odd diner that had shut for the day. We turned around and went in the other direction. The place we found claimed to shut at eight, but seated us as if it was perfectly normal. Debbie had a nice burrito, and I had a Jack Daniels Burger, with whisky sauce. Very good.
Then we came back to the motel so that I could make up some nonsense about being lost at sea before going to sleep.