6-28-06 (Wednesday): Another great day (are you bored with our great days yet?)! It’s our day off. It was supposed to rain, so we’d planned to do laundry and housework and then go to a movie this afternoon. Instead, it started clearing up at mid-morning, so after we finished our jobs, we headed for Pemaquid Point. It was a pretty drive (they all seem to be) of about 40 miles.

Our first stop was the little town of Round Pond. Here in Maine, a pond isn’t a little shallow, fresh water body of water. It’s often a large, salt water bay, which is what Round Pond is. The little town is quaint (again, like almost all the little towns up here). Here are some of the pictures we took in Round Pond.

We had lunch on the porch of a little restaurant on the shore. Food sure tastes great when you’re hungry and have a wonderful view!

This is "The Little Brown Church." It's on the National Register of Historic Places. I couldn't take the picture from a spot where you could see the whole view--it's perched right on the rocky shore.

This is the little general store in Round Pond. It had everything from penny candy to hardware. I picked up some cute toys for Hudson and
Austin.

Our next stop was Rachel Carson Salt Pond Preserve. It’s on the shores of Muscongus Bay and is actually a part of the Atlantic that’s trapped when the tide goes out (like a huge tidal pool). It was windy and quite rough today, and the tide was high, so we didn’t really see it as a pond at all. Rachel Carson got a lot of her information for the book The Edge of the Sea.






The beach is very rocky (ranging from pebbles to basketball sized) with two large areas that look almost like rocky reefs. The rocks are light graywith veins of white and specks of black. A brochure about the area says They’re called granulite and they were originally layers of quartz, feldspar and biotite. 420 million years ago, the rocks were squished together (that’s a technical term) by the collision of the continents, which generated such intense heat that some of the granulite was melted, sticking the different layers together.

The rocks were quite beautiful, and there were so many that I coveted some for the garden and walkway we’re building, but the signs said not to take any, so we didn’t. There were several kinds of seaweed, snails and birds in the area, as well as wild roses and sweet peas. Lovely! Here are some pictures.

We continued our drive down the point to Pemaquid Lighthouse Park. Next to Portland Light, this is my second favorite lighthouse of all time. The surf was crashing on the rocky reefs
stretching out like fingers from the lighthouse. We walked down about halfway to the surf.

Many people were close enough that the waves were almost crashing almost over them. Later, when we went in the little museum, there was a newspaper article about a guy who did that and was washed out to sea. It took rescuers ½ hour to reach him in a boat, and he died of heart failure. His body temperature was 80.5 degrees.

Once again, the scenery was spectacular. (I’m running out of adjectives to describe this coastal country. Someone help me out here!)

It started pouring down rain (I mean, the skies just opened up) just as we left, and it rained the whole way back. Kind of a miserable drive, but we thought the trip was worth it. When we got home, I made pizza with grilled veggies. Yummy!