5-25-06 Thursday: Yesterday we made it to our new home in Maine. We absolutely love it. It exceeds our expectations in every way. The scenery is just breathtaking. Every time you round a curve in the road, you see a cove with sailboats, islands, rocky cliffs and pounding surf. Our campsite has a small side yard with a lilac tree and it backs up to a stone wall (complete with resident chipmunks) and a forest. The camp office and store (where I'll work) looks like an old barn (green shingled) with a cupola and weather vane, and a porch with white rocking chairs. There are 85 wooded campsites, some charming one-room log cabins, and a path beside a stream that tumbles down off a cliff into the ocean. There's a seating area on the cliff overlooking the sea with rustic chairs, benches and a porch swing. All the shopping you could want is about a mile away (grocery, drugstore, Walmart, Home Depot, fast food, etc.).

We've met the owners who hired us (John and Lori) and the other workamper couple (Robert and Fran). One more workamper couple has been hired and is due next week, but the other workamper couple who were returning had a family emergency, so they're having to hire a second couple (for a total of 4 couples). The two couples we've met are great. We offered to get right to work this week, since we're a little early arriving, but they told us to get settled. We are going to help this Saturday with the lobster bake (free dinner!).

Today we worked most of the day. We washed the camper, organized the basement storage area and pantry, and I installed a way to manage our shoes that I dreamed up. I’m pretty proud of the shoe thing. Space is so limited, and shoes have been a problem—they take up so much room. Our bed has a boxed in space underneath where we store blankets, pillows and other bulky items (the mattress platform lifts up on hydraulic supports). I was napping one day on the way up here when the thought occurred to me that with an eyebolt on each end, we could stretch a bungee cord the length of the side of the box and stand the shoes up along the box. I refined the idea a little today by cutting the hooks off the bungee cords, putting them through the eye bolts and then wrapping a thin wire to hold the ends closed. It works great!

Late in the afternoon, we went exploring again. We went down into Rockport and walked out on a jetty that has a lighthouse on the end. Wiley tried to fish, but it was really cold and windy. There were crab claws and broken sea urchins all along the top of the jetty, which really puzzled me because the jetty is high above the surface of the water. I finally figured it out, though. These great big seagulls were getting the sea urchins and crabs from the shallow water and then breaking the shells on the hard top of the jetty! I challenged one great big seagull who’d just brought up a big sea urchin, and he gave it up to me (it was touch and go there for a while; he really didn’t want to leave his dinner). Wiley admired my trophy, but he didn’t want to keep it.

Back in camp, we enjoyed the scallops and flounder I bought yesterday with homemade tartar sauce, french fries, salad.The pictures below are a walk through our campground. Enjoy your stroll!

This is "Casa de Dykes" in its summer home.

This is "Workamper Row"--all the workampers will be parked in this area behind the office.

This is the back side of the office/store. Workamper row is on this side of the office and all the other campsites and the ocean are on the front side.

This is the front side of the office. I cut off the end--there are nice rocking chairs and a porch.

Here's the pool--no jacuzzi, though. Darn! The bath houses are really nice (that's the green building in the background). They have individual shower rooms--quite private, all ceramic tile. The toilets are in a room on the other side.

The cabins are cute, very clean and private, and they have BBQ grills and electricity, but they're just one room with a double bed and a bunk bed. There's a picnic table on the porch and a water faucet outside. It's a long walk to the bath house and there's no kitchen.

The creek starts out small, but it descends pretty rapidly in a series of small waterfalls until it reaches the bluff. There, it cascades over the edge and falls 50-80 feet to the sea below.











Now we reach the top of the rise and my little piece of heaven spreads below.










Have a seat here, or on one of the benches or the porch swing. Enjoy the garden and, of course, the view!

This is the lighthouse that you can see from our bluff. It sits on one of the many islands in Penobscot Bay. We're not sure what it's called yet.



Come and see us--you know you're dying to see it all for yourself!