Eric Eggen'sTrek Around the USA: Freeport, ME to Bar Harbor, ME

I did a lot today:

The Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. It is centered around an old wooden shipbuilding operation that went out of business 80 years ago. Actually, the last wooden schooner was built in Bath in 1920. It has added some other maritime features, including a collection of small boats used in Maine waters, and an exhibit on the Cold War US Navy. I particularly liked a short movie on the lobster industry and lobster fishermen.

Here was my favorite display:

This is a copper weather vane that was found in a barn. No one knows who made it. No one knows when it was made, though it was probably sometime in the 19th century. With that dearth of information, if it were a bit older it would probably be treated as an archaeological find.

And how about this for an arcane object:

That is the bow of the wooden clipper ship Snow Squall that was underwater for 118 years. It had run aground off of Cape Horn, and was condemned and sunk off the Falkland Islands in 1864. It was brought up in 1982. Now it sits in a garage by itself at the museum in Bath.

The Coastal Maine Botanical Garden. This is a new garden, having opened in 2007. It is a very ambitious garden. They used landscape designers and professional landscape installers on contract to do the work. It has many crowd-drawing features, and as a result, the parking lots were packed. It has a scent garden that is about five times larger than the one I saw at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. It has a very large children's garden complete with as much interactive stuff as you can put in a garden. It has a rose arbor and a meditation garden and an event lawn. And it has room to add a lot more.

Here are some views of the scent garden:

There are pictures of three varieties of spruce trees on the Miscellany page.

This professionally-done garden is exquisite and it is obviously a crowd-pleaser. But there is also something to be said about a volunteer-driven botanical garden. I am thinking of the much smaller garden near San Luis Obispo, California. What attracts me to that garden is that it has a theme: to gather plants from all of the Mediterranean climates around the world. Each plant tells a story and the entire garden tells a story. Perhaps as the Coastal Maine garden matures it will develop its own story.

Visit with Herb and Cathy. Julie's brother Herb and his wife Cathy have been coming to the Maine coast every summer for at least a dozen years. They bought a house on Thomaston Island three years ago. They live next door to a lobster factory, which is where the lobster fishermen bring their catch. Up to 100 lobster boats anchor in the bay. I spent four very pleasant hours visiting with them, and they treated me to a meal of steamed lobster, oven roasted potatoes and salad. "Simple fare", as they say. We're all used to live Maine lobster, but there is something especially sweet and succulent about eating a lobster that was in its ocean home only a few hours ago. Thanks, folks, for the treat and the conversation.