Bangor, ME

Sunday, September 17, 2023

We started our day at the Moose Creek RV Resort in Greenville, Maine. This morning, it was like Tropical Storm Lee never happened — the sun was shining brightly without a cloud in the sky. Of course, the ground was wet and many people along Maine’s eastern coast are still without power in the wake of the storm. Here in central Maine, no damage seems to have occurred. We saw several power & electric trucks lined up in the grocery store parking lot ready to deploy to affected areas.

Andi and I weren’t sure what our plan should be today. We have reservations for Acadia National Park Monday night, but right now the national park campgrounds are closed due to the storm. We hope they’ll re-open the campgrounds by tomorrow. If the coast is open for business, we want to start making our way toward Acadia, but we don’t want to travel to a place still dealing with the aftermath of a storm either. We sat in the grocery store parking lot for a long time this morning contemplating our next stop.

I called Camden State Park, which is situated on Maine’s eastern coastline, and the woman who answered the phone said the state park was open for camping today, but currently had no electricity or water. She sounded a bit stressed on the phone which ultimately gave us the confirmation we needed to hold off one more day before traveling to Maine’s coast. According to the news coverage, the biggest issue from the storm seems to be the water-saturated ground causing trees to topple onto power lines.

In Greenville, the sun was shining and it was a pleasant 70 degrees so Andi and I considered it a sign to entertain ourselves here for the day. First, we parked the RV along the shores of Moosehead Lake to actually see the lake now that it wasn’t downpouring rain. Moosehead Lake is 40 miles long by 20 miles wide — just massive, and quiet on this warm fall day.

Next, we decided to unhook the Jeep from the RV and go Jeeping around Moosehead Lake for a few hours. Andi drove the RV to a boat landing just outside of town where we parked the RV. Then, the four of us hopped in the Jeep and started exploring the area.

There are no specific Jeep trails around Moosehead Lake, but there are miles and miles of backroads. I really wanted to drive the Katahdin Woods & Waters National Scenic Byway which goes from Millinocket, Maine to Baxter State Park, but that’s farther east than we want to end up. Instead, we ended up driving through the woods. Andi splashed through lots of big puddles left by the rainstorm which made Aden squeal with delight.

Eventually, we stumbled upon an area called Gulf Hagas. This rugged network of organized trails leads to a gorge that is referred to as the “Grand Canyon of Maine” and then circles back to Moosehead Lake. It would’ve been the perfect place for us to ride today, except the woman Andi spoke to at the trail station said there was a culvert out and the road was inpassable. Bummer.

The four of us still had a great time getting lost in the Maine wilderness. Along the way, we stopped and hiked a short trail called Trout Brook Trail which leads to an outpost cabin in the woods. This would be a neat spot to hike into & set up camp for the night. The four of us hung around the shelter for a bit, looking at the lake and playing around in the cabin structure, before making our way back on the trail.

Trout Brook Trail wasn’t the most exciting trail to walk along (pretty flat and boring), but the little shelter in the woods with free canoes to utilize was really neat to see. In Maine, they have a lot of these hike-in structures which they call “lodges.” Andi and I couldn’t get over how much this area of Maine looks exactly like our woods back home in Wisconsin — similar trees, birds, insects, and landscape.

The kids were losing steam the last half-mile, so Andi offered $5 to the kid who could make it back to the Jeep first. Tory and Aden both took off running down the trail as quickly as they could, but Tory was the first to reach the end. The girl is a natural runner, though she’ll never admit it. Coming in second place, Aden sat down on the ground and started to cry. He said he had an unfair advantage because he was running in Crocs. The three of us reminded him that we told him wearing Crocs today was a bad choice. Obviously, he didn’t appreciate our commentary. Tory sat on the hood of the Jeep as she waited for the three of us to reach the end.

Around 2:00pm, the four of us rode back into the town of Greenville and then re-hooked the Jeep to the back of the RV. From there, we drove south along Highway 6 toward the city of Bangor, Maine where we planned to camp for the night.

Not far into our journey, Andi stopped in the town of Monson, Maine to grab something to eat for lunch. We ordered sandwiches and salads from the Monson General Store, and sat outside on their patio to eat in the sunshine. It was a gorgeous day in the mid-70’s. After seeing so much rain on this trip, we were just happy the sun was shining.

It took us abut 1 1/2 hours to reach Bangor, Maine. Andi made a reservation for us at Paul Bunyan Campground for the night. Before going there, we decided to check out the city of Bangor. Do you ever have the name of a place in your mind and think it’s going to be awesome only to arrive and find out it’s lackluster? Yeah, that’s how we felt about Bangor. For some reason, I had really high hopes for this town. The University fo Maine is located here, and on paper in looks like there are a ton of parks and recreation. All we saw when we visited were drug addicts wandering the streets. Seriously. We attempted to park the RV in a parking lot downtown so we could walk around and check it out, but there were two people so completely high working on a van in the lot that it made us nervous to leave our RV parked there. We tried visiting the famous Paul Bunyan statue in another part of town and saw a homeless man packing drugs into a pipe on the sidewalk in front of it. This isn’t the first time on this trip we’ve seen blatant drug use on city streets which has forced several impromptu conversations with our kids about what drugs can do to a person. It seems like it’s a real problem in both the US and Canada. It’s sad.

After driving around Bangor, we eventually found ourselves at Gifford’s Ice Cream. Clearly, they serve great ice cream here because the line was as long as their list of flavors. We ordered our ice cream and sat outside at a picnic table to enjoy it.

Then, we drove a few miles down the road to our campsite. The Paul Bunyan campground was nothing special, but we didn’t need it to be. We had water and electric hookups, so I took a shower and the four of us snuggled in for the night. Aden lost a tooth earlier this morning, so he put it under a cup on the counter in hopes the Tooth Fairy would visit in the night.

Tomorrow, we’re making our way “down east” as the locals say to Acadia National Park.