Seen in Maine...

... scene in Maine. -- PL

... to Dover, NH, and points north in Maine

So, after escaping from Boston, Jeannine and I headed north, to our old "stomping grounds" of the Dover/Portsmouth area. We were pretty hungry, so instead of heading directly to our place of lodging -- the Cliff House in Ogunquit, ME -- we stopped off at one of our favorite seafood restaurants, Newicks, in Dover. We got great seats near a window and had Newicks' always-fresh seafood.

It had been some time since I'd stayed at the Cliff House with Jeannine, and it had changed quite a bit, including a whole new building (which is where we were staying). We had a nice view of the ocean from the balcony off our room, even though -- at least early each morning -- the ocean was covered in fog, as you can see in this view from the balcony.

But within a few hours, it cleared up and we could sit out there and watch the waves. I spent quite a bit of time wandering around on the rocks -- not on these vertical rocks…

… which are the cliffs from which the Cliff House derives its name, but on the safer, more navigable rocks to either side of the cliffs. I took many photos of interesting rocks, and did a little bit of sketching. Actually, I only did two sketches, and here they are.

I was hoping to do more, but I was too lazy.

I did manage to capture a few decent shots of waves -- here's one I shot from our balcony using the camera's zoom lens (love the colors)…

… and another bit of "crashing wave action" caught by the camera's high-speed "burst" function.

I even got myself in one shot. 

I never get tired of looking at these rocks by the ocean. They fascinate me with their shapes, patterns, and colors.

At one point -- I think it was on our first day there -- I was out on the rocks looking for good angles in the morning, while there was still quite a bit of mist on the ocean, when I heard the sound of a boat engine, and this lobster boat came slowly chugging out of the mist.

It's certainly not a rare sight on the coast of Maine…

… but I thought it was kind of cool.

Sometimes the rocks can seem barren, almost a moonscape, devoid of life… but then you look a bit closer, and there is quite a bit of life. This large spider (one of many on the rocks) paused in its rapid scurrying to and fro to allow me to snap a portrait shot…

… and one day on the way back to our room, I spotted these bluets growing among the rocks…

… and this bright lichen growing ON the rocks.

We had a great time, and ate lots of good food -- even went to "Johnny's Oarweed" in Perkins Cove in Ogunquit, the restaurant at which a pre-TMNT Kevin Eastman once worked as a lobster cook, and we had a lovely meal on a beautiful day sitting outside by the ocean.

However, I neglected to do one important thing while we were there, and I regret it -- I didn't call my pal Steve Lavigne to see if we could get together. Sorry, Steve! -- PL

Kennbunkport (and elsewhere)

I haven't blogged in the last few days, and that's partially becauseI have been otherwise occupied enjoying a brief spontaneous vacation with my wife in Kennebunkport, ME.

Jeannine had learned a few months ago of an interesting new bookstore in Kennebunkport, called "Kennebooks", and in January of this year we had given some thought to driving up there and staying in what appeared to be a very nice inn called the White Barn Inn and Spa (something I had stumbled upon while researching Kennebooks' location on Google maps) for my birthday. But January and February were months with a lot of snow and cold weather, and we figured it might be better to wait for better climatic conditions for our initial visit to Kennebunkport. (Curiously, though we have been to the southern coastal area of Maine many times for vacations (pretty much every year since Emily was a baby), we had never been to Kennebunkport, which is really not very much further north from Ogunquit or Welles.)

With the weather starting to look better here in western Massachusetts, and the snow fairly rapidly receding, we decided to take a chance and go up to the White Barn Inn for a couple of nights. As it turned out, this decision dovetailed nicely with a talk about writing that Jeannine was scheduled to give to a group of teachers at the Phyllis Allen Smith North Shore Council of the International Reading Association meeting in Danvers, MA. That town is north of Boston and only about an hour from Portsmouth, NH, which we decided would be our first overnight stop on our way up to Kennebunkport.

I helped Jeannine get set up (mostly getting the projector and computer ready for her Keynote presentation) and wandered around taking photographs of the room and some of the people there. Jeannine introduced me to the vivacious Elaine Magliaro, retired teacher/librarian and current writer of poetry for children, and the person who invited Jeannine to the event (and who graciously allowed me to sit in and eat dinner with everyone), and also to a very nice young woman named Grace Lin, an author/illustrator she'd met some years previously, who came to the event just to see (and listen to) Jeannine. Grace had had several books published, including her Newbery-honored "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon", a book she wrote and illustrated. (I got to see this book the next day at the Dover Public Library, and was impressed -- I have not yet read it, but the illustrations were very cool.)

Here's a shot of Jeannine signing a copy of her book "Borrowed Names" for Grace...

... and one of Elaine, Jeannine, and Grace.

Before Jeannine's talk, there was about half an hour during which people could buy copies of a variety of Jeannine's books and get them signed, and while that was happening I got a chance to chat with Grace a little bit about the world of illustrating, something I hope to get back into, and she gave me several useful tips.

Jeannine gave a hour-long talk, which held everyone's attention (not an easy feat when dinner follows the talk and people are already hungry). The food afterwards was great, and we enjoyed talking to the teachers who sat at our table.

Following the talk, we packed up Jeannine's stuff and headed up to Portsmouth, one of our favorite towns. The following morning, we ate breakfast at Popovers (I mentioned this place in my blog last year), and I had a wonderful thing they described as a "breakfast quesadilla". Very yummy! Check it out...

I have more to write about but the sun is shining, it's almost one o'clock, and the temptation to get out on my bicycle is just too strong -- I must go! I'll be back later. -- PL

-------------------------------------

Okay, I'm back -- had a nice bicycle ride out to Hadley on the bike path, and stopped at Panera Bread for lunch after picking up a magazine or two at Barnes and Noble. It is SO nice to be able to get out on the bike again after this long, snowy winter.

So after breakfast in Portsmouth (and a hour or two for Jeannine to write while sipping coffee at Popovers), we checked out of our hotel and got on the road, first stopping at an historic site in Portsmouth that I'd remembered going to once, years ago, with Jeannine and/or Emily. It was called Fort Stark, and it is essentially an abandoned shore defense installation from  World War II. My slightly shaky memory of that single visit some twenty-five or more years ago included this detail -- that the site was on or at the end of a street the name of which had something to do with either things floral or things fruity. As it turned out, when I did some searching online the previous night, it was on Wild Rose Lane in New Castle, NH. (I love it when I come across evidence that my memory of certain things is not ALL that terrible.) The site was not open yet (I guess their season has yet to start) and the parking lot was closed, with ominous "No Parking!" signs all around the small lot outside the gate. So we just stayed a few minutes, allowing me to take some shots of one side of the site. Here's a small panoramic view:

I hope to get back there when the site is open, and roam around the grounds so I can take a lot more photos.

Jumping back in the car, we headed toward Maine. We decided to stop in Ogunquit and have lunch, and picked up some food at a store in the center of town. We found a vacant bench at the south end of the Marginal Way -- not very far, in fact, from "Johnny's Oarweed", a seafood restaurant where a young Kevin Eastman used to cook lobsters -- and ate our lunch, per Jeannine's wise suggestion, while watching (and listening to) beautiful waves crashing on the rocks in the cove. 

We continued to follow Route 1 up to Kennebunkport, arriving at the Inn about forty-five minutes later. The staff could not have been more friendly and gracious, and they showed us to our cottage, which was about a quarter of a mile from the Inn proper, and situated on the shores of the Kennebunk River. It was small, cozy, quiet and tidy, and we loved it. (Except for the Wi-Fi -- the signal was pretty weak inside the cottage, leading to a frustratingly sporadic connection. If i hadn't discovered that sitting outside on the front steps of the cottage provided [for whatever reason] a much stronger signal, we would have been virtually Internet-less. Horror!)

We did find Kennebooks (in fact, drove right by it on our way into Keenbunkport) and thought it was pretty cool. And even though it was Saint Patrick's day, and we thought we might have trouble finding a place to eat supper in town that evening, we ended up having some decent Mexican food at a joint named Pedro's, which the proprietor of Kennebooks had recommended.

The following day, we had AMAZING weather for March 18 -- sunny and 70 degrees! -- which made our excursion to check out Kennbunkport's beaches quite a pleasure. First we drove to Goose Rocks Beach, stopping along the way in Cape Porpoise to pick up some food at a deli called the Cape Porpoise Kitchen.

It was great food, but what we didn't count on was the brisk wind that kicked up when we settled down on the beach to eat -- blowing sand all over, which was fun to watch, but not so much fun when some of it got into our food. (It made me wonder -- and remark to Jeannine later -- if dentists in coastal areas see more damage to people's teeth from eating sand in this manner than their counterparts inland do.)

Here's a photo of the sand blowing across the beach, although a still image doesn't  really do justice to the sinuous undulations of these sand waves. They really were quite beautiful.

I spent some time taking photographs of some of the interesting textures in the beach sand -- I love looking at these things. Here are a few examples:

We walked to the north end of Goose Rocks Beach, then turned back. I saw this single clam shell on the beach, and liked the way it looked against the backdrop of the ocean, the sky and the sand:

And this one I like for several reasons, mostly the light reflecting on the water and the wet sand, and the frozen moment of Jeannine's forward stride, as she is made almost a silhouette by the bright sunlight:

It was a wonderful day, with wonderful almost summer-like weather. So you might be able to imagine my reaction when, upon awakening the next morning, I rolled up the window shade near to our bed in the cottage and saw this:

SNOW! 

I couldn't believe it. I stared at it, and then just started laughing. I mean, it was just so absurd, to go from almost summer conditions the day before, to a snowfall the following morning. I kept chuckling that morning, every time I thought about it. 

Now, if the snowfall had been heavy, and there had been a serious accumulation, then I would probably not have laughed so much. But this flurry didn't last too long, melted pretty quickly, and was actually kind of pretty while it lasted.

I tried to get in touch with Steve Lavigne while we were there, because he and his family live within a half hour's drive of Kennebunkport, but once again I didn't plan it well (i.e. waited too long to call him) and it didn't happen. Next time, Steve!

Jeannine and I had a great time at the White Barn Inn, and hope to go back again. The staff was incredibly nice and helpful, and the food (we had breakfast there twice) was excellent. I'm not sure if it would be as quiet and restful during the peak summer season, but in the spring or fall I think I'd like to spend a few more days in one of those cottages.

Heading home on Saturday, we decided to stop once more in Dover. I had mentioned to Jeannine that she might like this cafe I'd eaten at last year, "Cafe on the Corner" at 478 Central Avenue, a new eatery in what was once one of our favorite places in Dover, an ice cream bar. And, I told her, there's a bookstore right across the street. 

She enjoyed the meal at the cafe, but wasn't too sure about the bookstore -- Baldface Books at 488 Central Avenue -- until she discovered their extensive poetry section in the back, which she loved. We each left the store with several book purchases, including one which I bought partly because it was so cheap ($1.50) but mostly because it had some illustrations which I found intriguing. It was a Scholastics Books paperback titled "The Monsters' Room" (original title: "Peter's Angel"…!? Go figure…), and it contained a number of black and white illustrations by someone named Lilian Obligado. They were really nice, apparently drawn in pencil, with a lot of energy in their subtle shadings. I plan to look for more of her work.

And then it was back on the road home, although we did make another bookstore stop -- the Toadstool in Keene, NH (a GREAT bookstore). 

Not a bad little vacation. -- PL

Morning at Kittery Point, Maine

This is another image from my trip to the Dover area this past weekend, taken fairly early in the morning, shortly before I surprised Steve Lavigne by showing up on his doorstep with no advance warning. With the help of my TrekPod and my camera's self-timer function, I managed to get myself into one of the three photos I used to create this small panoramic shot of Kittery Point beach in Maine, a place Jeannine and I used to go to sometimes to swim and walk. It was typically not very crowded because it was not, frankly, a great place to swim, but perhaps more to the point, there were not many parking spaces.

But it is a beautiful spot, and even though my panorama-making software once again had a few problems with the moving waves, I like this one -- the colors, lighting and composition appeal to me. -- PL

Weekend in New Hampshire (and Maine)

This past weekend, my wife went out to Minneapolis to visit a family friend and attend a convention of like-minded bloggers. I would have loved to have gone with her, but in spite of my best efforts, it just didn't work out. So while she was in the midwest having fun, I decided that rather than be miserable and lonely at home, I could be miserable and lonely* somewhere more interesting and potentially distracting in a good way. So I chose to spend those days by myself in the Dover, NH area.

I stayed in Portsmouth, but I made trips to some of our our old haunts, favorite areas on the seacoast as well as Dover itself and the neighboring town of Durham. It was interesting to walk around Dover and see what has changed -- not much, I think. The ice cream parlor that we used to enjoy going to is no longer there, replaced by a nifty little cafe where I ate two of my lunches that weekend, and they were both excellent. I walked over to the good ol' Dover Public Library, which we used quite a bit when we lived there…

… and when I went inside to poke around, I was happy to see that they still had the "magazine swap" shelf that I so enjoyed back in the early 1980's -- it was a great way to recycle your old magazines. (Although i think it may have been called a magazine EXCHANGE back then… but I could be confusing it with a similar thing at the Sharon, CT library some time later.)

Looking around the library, I found Jeannine's latest book, "Borrowed Names", shelved in the poetry for young adults section. That's it, fourth from the left.

Here's a shot of the cover of "Borrowed Names".

(By the way -- and I say this in a completely unbiased way -- it's a great book. Check it out!)


Continuing my stroll around Dover, I took one street that led to this view…

… a bit of interesting scenery I don't recall from our days in Dover. Maybe we never walked up that street.

After a couple of hours of reminiscing, I drove out to Ogunquit, ME, where I walked on part of the fabled "Marginal Way", and I was reminded of why I prefer the coast of Maine to the coast of Cape Cod (well, to be fair, the parts of the coast of Cape Cod that I saw a couple of weeks ago)...

... great rocks! You can't really see it in the photo below, but the stiff breeze was blowing spray off the white-capped waves -- very dramatic!

I did sit down and do a little sketching of some of the rocks, but it was pretty cold and breezy, so I only did one drawing. I have to spend more time up there in the warm parts of the year, I think.

The next day I decided to take a drive up to one of our favorite beaches, Long Sands in York… so named because it's, well, a long, sandy beach. I remembered that the last time we walked on it,  the sand was not very squishy underfoot, but firm… and I started thinking that MAYBE it would be firm enough to support me and my bicycle. So I parked near one end of the beach, carried my bike down the steps to the sand, and started riding. And it was GREAT! I think -- no, I KNOW -- that this was the most fun I had all weekend. I spent probably an hour riding up and down the beach, dodging seagulls and sandpipers, going in and out of the surf, and watching my shadow, cast by the setting sun.

It was almost too picturesque, and shortly made even MORE so by the rising of the moon just off Nubble Point near the lighthouse. I took a few photos of this scene using the zoom lens on my camera (which is why the moon looks so huge, I think), and put them together into this little panorama.

On my last day of this impromptu vacation, I headed up a little further into Maine, to drop in unannounced on Steve Lavigne and his family. I think I surprised the heck out of him, but we had a nice visit. Then I decided to drive back to Dover one last time, because i had a mission there.

You see, on my way up on Friday, I had stopped at a general store called Calef's just outside Dover, and picked up a few postcards which I intended to mail to Jeannine. One of them featured a cool aerial photo of Dover, and I was hoping to see if our old house was, by some chance, included in the image. So I was studying it, and for some reason, I just couldn't figure out exactly from which direction the photo was taken… which was a little odd, because I am pretty familiar with the layout of downtown Dover. So I once again walked around the streets of Dover, trying to pick out significant landmarks and compare them to the tiny images in the postcard, attempting to get my bearings.

And after about ten minutes of this, it hit me -- the photo was REVERSED! I found it kind of surprising that just reversing the image would throw me off so much, but it did. (When I got home, I scanned the postcard, flipped in in Photoshop, and instantly everything fell into place and made sense.) Sadly, our old neighborhood was just out of shot in the postcard's aerial image.

On the drive back home, I decided to take a spin through nearby Durham, NH, and had to stop to take a photo of this fabulous tree, which just at the moment I was driving by happened to be lit up perfectly by the sun. It was simply blazing. -- PL

(*Full disclosure: I was not actually miserable. -- PL)

Balance

I suspect that from time immemorial, human beings have been stacking rocks one atop the other, particularly when they are near the seashore and find an abundance of convenient stones to stack. I did this pile during the second week of our two weeks in Maine…



… and it actually stayed up for about a day until a big storm blew through and knocked half of it down.

The following day, Jeannine and I walked the Marginal Way in Ogunquit prior to having a wonderful dinner at a place called "Five-O" in that little coastal town with Emily and her friends Jenelle and Lindsay. The Marginal Way is a very cool 1.5 mile paved path which follows the coastal rocks between Perkins Cove and Ogunquit Beach. It's quite a beautiful walk, with some great vistas of the ocean and the shore rock formations. The day we did the walk, the winds were blowing quite hard and the waves were quite spectacular. Here's a shot I took of Jeannine and me along the way…



Further on down the path, we were startled and amused to find more evidence of what I postulated in the first line of this blog entry -- dozens and dozens of small piles of beach rocks stacked on some of the larger rock formations near the path. Someone (or a group of someones) had been quite busy doing a lot of balancing of stones. This photo represents about a tenth of the total number of these things that we saw that day in this area.



And balance is one theme with which I come away from this two-week vacation. It's the first time I can remember that I have really fully enjoyed a vacation, and the first time I can remember that I was sad to leave and come home. I feel as though I have made significant strides towards moving to a more balanced, healthy life, one in which worries and concerns take their true proportionate place alongside the joys and pleasures of life. I'm not completely there yet -- that's going to take a while still -- but this was a big step. -- PL

Clouds and waves

Steve Lavigne and his wife Denise, who live not very far from where we are staying for our Maine vacation, invited us out to dinner last night in York. They treated us to a very nice meal at a restaurant where, as Jeannine remembers it (I only have a very vague memory of this) she and I were turned away years ago (because we did not meet their dress code), probably on one of our return trips to the area after moving away from Dover, NH to Sharon, CT. This time, it was not a problem -- either because we were less scruffy than we were back then, or the new owners are less insistent upon such protocols. I'm not sure, but it was great to see Steve and Denise. Thanks again for the meal!

After this delightful get-together, Jeannine and I headed back to our rental home, but we decided to take the shore road, thinking it might be nice to do that beach walk we'd been talking about for roughly a week and a half. We'd had the idea that we wanted to take a walk on a long beach, preferably without too many people around, and maybe near sunset so the sun was not blazing down on us. And at low tide, too, so there would be more of a beach to wander upon.

I can't believe I had forgotten that this beach existed, because just a couple of years ago, Steve Lavigne and I had ridden our bicycles to it from another vacation rental home (not more than half a mile away from the one we are currently enjoying). It's called "Long Sands", it's in York, ME, and it turned out to be perfect. As it was about 6:30PM, there were lots of parking spaces available along the sea wall, and very few people there, and the tide was pretty far out.

Jeannine and I took off our shoes (she first, me following a minute or so later when I realized what a dopey thing it was to be walking in my shoes on this beautiful, soft sand beach) and walked down pretty much the length of the beach, enjoying an occasional wave across our bare feet and the feel of the sand beneath, watching a few hardy surfers catch some late waves, several dogs enjoying a romp through the waves, and some parents chasing little kids across the sand.

And a big plus was the fact that as the sun was setting, it was turning the clouds various shades of purple and gold, colors which in places (if you looked westward, toward the sunset) were beautifully reflected off ripples of water on the beach.

Looking east, out toward the ocean, I found myself compelled to take some photos I could later stitch together into a cloud panorama. I knew the waves would very likely not stitch together correctly (and I was right), but the clouds did, as you can see here.



That figure walking toward the ocean just to the right of the center of the image is Jeannine, who enjoyed the small waves cresting over her feet. She thought the water was even warmer there than it had been earlier in the day, when we'd taken a couple of "boogie boards" and romped around in the surf at York Harbor beach. I think she was right, and we may go back to Long Sands today to swim, if it warms up. It's our last full day here in Maine on this vacation trip, and it would be nice to get in the ocean one more time before we have to leave. -- PL

Glimmers

It's a bad weather day here in Maine, good for the trees and grass and ponds but bad for vacationers. I shouldn't complain too much -- we've had more than a week of great weather -- but I am kind of down because the heavy rain and winds are keeping me from heading down to the pebble beach below our rental house, where I have been going pretty much every day since we got here to sketch rocks.

As anyone who has visited the Maine coast can attest, one thing it is not short on by any means is rocks -- rocks of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Beautiful rocks, rocks in fantastic profusion and variety. Harshly-angled, jagged rocks next to sensually rounded rocks, shaped and smoothed by the endless tides.

And I have been having a good time drawing them. My wife has asked "Are you planning on drawing anything other than rocks?" And I do… in fact, I drew a gnarled piece of driftwood a few days ago. But right now, I like drawing these rocks. I enjoy watching an image emerge on the page of white paper as I scratch and scribble, hatch and cross-hatch away with one of the several markers I carry in my shirt pocket.

And the simple fact that I LIKE drawing these rocks is what has given me a new glimmer of hope that the joy I used to feel in drawing anything is slowly beginning to return. It's been a long while since I have spent much time drawing from life, but I am starting to remember how much fun it can be. It can also be incredibly frustrating in equal measure, of course, when you are trying to capture the essence of something real on paper and it just isn't working.

But one of the things I realized, and it came out last week during a conversation with Jeannine after we'd taken a break from eating fried clams, swimming, and gazing at the ocean from the back deck of the house we're renting to travel up to Portland, ME and see the Winslow Homer exhibit, is that I don't need to be so picky about getting everything, all the shapes and textures and other pertinent details, JUST SO. It's something I'd learned a long time ago when I started drawing from life in college, and had kind of forgotten. But as Jeannine in her quiet wisdom so cogently put it, "The world is inspiration, and art is not a mirror."

I'm thinking I will continue this when I get home. There are lots of things to draw in the world, and I am going to try my hand at putting some of them in my sketchbook. -- PL

Simulacrum

Although I don't read as many magazines as I used to these days, one of the ones I still get fairly regularly is Fortean Times. In it, there are often photographs of things in nature which sort of look like other things -- usually a face in some natural feature like a tree trunk or boulder. They call these things "simulacrum", defined on dictionary.com as "a slight, unreal, or superficial likeness or semblance".

On this somewhat unseasonably cold and wet Maine day, I walked down to the pebble beach below the house we're renting and spent some time walking on and looking at rocks. As I was pondering some rocks in the tidal zone, I noticed this:



See the face peering back? It almost looks like someone trapped among the rocks. At least, it does to me. -- PL