Summer in Maine

For a week each year, we travel to Maine to experience its motto, "The way life should be." We love the coast, the lighthouses, the quaint harbors and basically everything about it.

This year, like last fall, we drove all night in order to be at the Maine border to start our first day. We had an interesting little detour on the way: We decided to pull off in Jersey City, N.J., at 2 a.m. to try to photograph the NYC skyline, and getting back on the highway, we headed in the wrong direction and took the Holland Tunnel into NYC! I've always wanted Mike to drive us to NYC, and it turns out the middle of the night was the perfect time! We ended up driving through Soho to cross the city and get back to Interstate 95 to Connecticut. Fun!

In Maine, we travel Route 1 and hit all the major lighthouses as we head up the coast. Nubble in York Beach is the first stop (really easy to get to off the highway).

Portland Head Light is surrounded by beautiful park grounds and a walking path. The first thing Mike does, though, to get the best photos, is wander off the path and climb down the rocks to get closer to the crashing surf.

Most times we are in Portland, it is pouring down rain. Our visit this year started with blue skies and white puffy clouds, and we had beautiful weather for the majority of the trip.

An artist was taking advantage of the nice day and painting a pretty good rendering of the scene.

In mid-Coast Maine, Marshall Point (which was seen in Forrest Gump as the easternmost point he ran to) and Pemaquid lighthouses are two of our favorites. This year, we went to Pemaquid at night to get a different shot. Mike shined a flashlight over the rocks to get the effect in the photo below. I was sitting on the rocks above at right enjoying the nearly full orange-colored moon over the ocean.

Up the coast a little in Rockland, you can walk out a nearly mile-long jetty to see the city's light that sits in the middle of the harbor. The morning we were there, a few loberstermen were checking their pots and getting dive-bombed by sea gulls hoping for some breakfast.

We spent four nights in Lubec, Maine, the easternmost town in the United States, where the sun rises in July at 4:50 a.m. Luckily, there was no hurricane forecast to hit this time, like when we were there last fall. From Lubec, you can also cross a short bridge to Campobello, Island, Canada, and in the area there are 3 great lighthouses.

It just so happened that the famed red-and-white-striped West Quoddy lighthouse in Lubec was open for tours while we were there (it only opens to allow people to climb to the top once a year).

This photo from the tower shows metal eagles that help with water drainage.

After enjoying some lunch and music that were part of the festivities at West Quoddy, we headed over to Campobello for the afternoon, and for the first time, saw finback whales from the shore! They were everywhere that day around the East Quoddy lighthouse, at the northern point of the island.

The cool thing about East Quoddy is that tides determine when you can walk to the lighthouse. Lubec and Campobello are separated by the Bay of Fundy, which has the highest tides in the world. To visit the lighthouse, you must climb down 3 separate metal rung ladders and cross the bay floor. You can only do this within the two hours around low tide. If you don't come back in time, you get stuck for 12 hours. And in July, it was 55 degrees that evening!

We also discovered that they also now offer tours of the inside of this light. So this was something new that we got to do.

Back in Lubec, there's a short jetty you can walk out that has an international marker on it, where you are technically in Canada.

On our last evening in Lubec, we spent the sunset at West Quoddy trying to get a good shot. Although it wasn't perfect photography-wise, it was a peaceful spot to round out our time in northeast Maine.

Next stop, Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park ...