If you enjoy my blog please consider helping me fund my lifelong dream of having an educational farm and check out my GoFundMe. Thank you! https://www.gofundme.com/help-fund-an-educational-farmI must admit exploring the area I live has already been so much fun but I have a bunch of requests from an assortment of different people to go on some adventures in Maine so I am in the planning stages of that right now.
When I was younger I spent nine godawful months living in central Maine without a car. To me it was a vast wasteland. I always read the license plates reading the state motto: “Vacationland” and thought it might be a more accurate if it read, “Where people come to die.” This was mostly because just about every woman I knew up there was in home care. Another friend who lived in Maine told me harrowing tales of potato picking and being stared down by pissed off Native Americans (and hey, I would be pissed off too if someone drove my ancestors off their land and relegated us to some godforsaken rocky hellhole in the northernmost part of Nowhere…)
But maybe it’s not that bleak. I have heard from a lot of wealthier tourists that Maine is drop dead gorgeous… so I must be missing something here. I have spent my afternoon and evening today researching places to go and wow, Maine is one quirky place. Of course there is much beauty to be seen on various hiking trails and parks including a “waterfall tour” I have promised one group of people. I look very much forward to that.
But Maine is more than state parks. It’s…. curious. The people there are… interesting at times. I may reside in the Live Free or Die state of New Hampshire but I think Maine maintains far more of this spirit. Over the past few hours I have read of disputes over the right to display dead seagulls, town disputes over whether or not you can build 20 foot tall metal statues of your visions from God in your yard, and yes even a half a dozen giant lobsters that all appear to be humping something. Yes, Maine is a weird place.
And if you think there’s anything going on in Maine you should just check a listing of their museums… the Sardine History Museum, The Museum of Umbrella Covers, and my personal favorite: The Maine State Prison Showroom where “trinkets and toys at lovingly hand made by maximum security prisoners!” Even that wasn’t nearly as creepy as Fawcett’s Toy museum which has me repeating an emphatic, “NOPE! NOPE! NOPE!” I mean look at their welcome sign out front… if there were ever a sign that secretly read, “Serial killers reside here,” this would be it.
But with all that being said and all jokes about Bigfoot aside I am actually really looking forward to spending some time in Maine bopping around and taking it all in – every beautiful piece of scenery and every godawful piece of metal scrap art – each and every little bit of it because there’s nowhere else in the world quite like Maine.
If you are enjoying Catching Marbles please consider adding a dollar or two to my limited gas money fund so I can continue going on adventures and sharing them with you! Thank you!
Today I decided to check out some prison camp ruins rumored to be in Rutland State Park in Massachusetts. The directions said they were on Prison Camp Road, which was easy enough to remember but what they don’t tell you is the park is FULL of primitive dirt roads going in all directions, most of which the GPS does not recognize, and they aren’t labelled either. So this place was somewhat difficult to find but not too bad. It was a lucky day and the road I needed wasn’t gated off due to seasonal flooding as many were. The prison ruins are visible from the road and since you can only drive five miles an hour without breaking an axle it’s hard to miss.
Hikers who knew where they were going seemed to be using the roads to amble down rather than drive – which is a wonderful idea if you have a map! I drove around for a long time and passed several bridges and rivers and a few rock formations that were just to die for. This place seemed to have it all and we were out in the middle of nowhere. For as peaceful at it was there was also a very wild and untamed sense about it – maybe this was because of the occasional bits and pieces of other ruins that dotted the roads here and there – like a staircase to nowhere which was probably someone’s house at some point in history.
