Tag: Travel

Back in the saddle again (I hope)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For the past few weeks, I’ve been pretty much out of action. Good thing I schedule most of the Barn releases well in advance.

The latest sequence of setbacks started when I knocked a martini glass over, splashing my laptop keyboard, while talking to my wife. And here I’ve been the one to scold others about drinking coffee right over the computers. Ah!

Many of the keys became irreparably stuck or functionless, so it was time to move on to a new machine.

Things were going well with moving my files over from Carbonite until Microsoft’s One Drive got in the way. I have way too many photos for the MS service unless I opt to pay, which I prefer not to do. It’s a Big Brother Is Watching You sort of thing. We’ve been warned.

I wound up taking both machines to a highly recommended computer guy an hour down the road.

Just kept telling myself I wasn’t screwed, not between that and the fact that my beloved elder stepdaughter had given me an external hard drive for one Christmas and I had all but maybe my last two months’ worth of new writing and photos backed up there.

Alas, I’ve also been vigilant about erasing photos from my cell phone gallery and my Google photos. Get the picture? It’s just too easy to get bogged down in all the clutter otherwise.

Being without a computer is an exercise of its own these days. I’m far from the point of using my phone for most of my online browsing and emailing, and I’m definitely not drafting blog posts much less a novel there.

That said, enough of the whining. I’m back.

~*~

Just in time to keep a nervous eye on Hurricane Lee, which may have Eastport as a target. We’d rather Lee go out to sea, well to the east of Nova Scotia to our east. We’ll see.

~*~

The lead headline in the Bangor Daily News the other day touted another development:

Eastport Set to Host Record 15 Cruise Ship Visits This Fall.

The first ship arrives tomorrow, ahead of the autumn foliage.

Quite simply, Eastport is being discovered as a unspoiled destination, in contrast to crowded Bar Harbor or the state’s biggest city, Portland.

Here’s hoping the rogue hurricane season doesn’t disrupt this trend.

~*~

Here’s also hoping for fine conditions at the end of the month and the schooner cruise on my schedule.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of writing I need to attend to, not all of it mine.

Best wishes to you all.

We have four principal towns in Way DownEast Maine

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

They’re Calais, Eastport, Lubec, and Machias. Or the other way around, depending on how you’re driving or sailing.

Like pearls on a string, one that hugs the coastline of vast Washington County.

The image of four anchors arrayed along a map makes sense, each one with its own distinctive attraction.

Their combined population comes to barely eight thousand.

The terrain around here is much more real than Acadia, for sure, if you’re the least bit interested in the Real Maine.

I’m feelin’ some schooner excitement

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere in my youth I fell under the spell of windjammers – vessels under full sail in the wild ocean. Those were as far away from my native Ohio as were the white-capped mountains that also caught my fancy.

Over the years, though, even as I came to know first the Pacific Northwest and later, coastal New England, I never considered actually going on an overnight windjammer cruise. Dismissed it as too expensive on our limited income. For contrast, I should note that I’ve never had any interest in an ocean-liner cruise. Zip.

But in late May, a dear friend from Vermont stopped by for a few days on his way to his annual windjammer trip on Penobscot Bay and that, well, reignited those dreams.

My wife looked at our budget and encouraged me to join him on his early autumn return. For the record, she’s declining to go too, remembering a bad seasick whale watch excursion when we were first together. No way would she venture forth for so many hours or days.

Upshot is at the end of next month buddy and I will spend the better part of a week under sail on a historic schooner exploring some famed Maine waters, especially the lighthouses along the way.

I have to admit, a windjammer should be my kind of excitement. And because my buddy grew up sailing, I’ll certainly be privy to a deep source of inside information. At least maybe I’ll have more of the terms right when I report on our adventure.

In addition, many of the classic sailing ships were built only a block or two from our house, back in the heyday of masts and canvas sails. The remaining keel of one schooner is exposed at low tide only a block or two from my house.

I’ve started counting the days till we set sail.

It’s been a slow season for tourism, and even the summer rentals are down

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

From the start of our travel season, things here have felt slow. I haven’t seen as many cars as I have in the past or as many states represented in their license plates, for one thing. While there are people on the streets, they’re not crowds.

Even down on Cape Cod, summer homes are available rather than reserved long in advance.

Somehow, we’re hearing that retail sales have been holding up, but we’re also seeing more vacancies in the Airbnb options, too. (The latter hits us as good news, considering how the investment buyers have been skewering the home market away from working families we desperately need.)

Still, visitors are the key to retail businesses in our part of Maine – our version of Black Friday has already passed or soon will, unlike the day after Thanksgiving push elsewhere. Maybe the visits by cruise ships in the foliage season will provide a much needed boost.

Could much of this reflect the reality that inflation is finally pinching family budgets?