Signing In From Far Away From Home

As some of you know, I left Alaska for a two-week trip to Maine with good friends of mine. Thought I'd bring you up to date on my trip. And, by the way, have posted to both my websites while I've been traveling, so am keeping up as best I can.

I can understand why I live in my small town in Alaska. We left Boston to travel to my childhood home in Old Lyme, Connecticut. It's now an inn, so we stayed there. We spent a morning just trying to figure out how to get out of Boston.

We finally found the right road, and crawled along in building traffic. At least we moved forward, though slowly. When I was a kid, people didn't like to drive long distances because the roads were curvy and slow, with lots of small towns that slowed you even more.

Now there are freeways everywhere, but it still takes forever to get anywhere because there are so many cars. No, I am not sorry I live in a sparsely-populated place.

Trees are just beginning to change to their fall colorful display. I hope they turn within two weeks so we will get some good views before heading home.

We stayed two nights in the house where I spent my first nine years. It's been a trip! I slept in the room that is the closest I could get to being in my old bedroom. It's about half the size of the original.

It contains what is perhaps the smallest bathroom ever seen in an inn. Back when I was a kid, there was no upstairs bathroom. The only bathroom in that huge house could be found downstairs at the back of the house, and of course all the bedrooms were upstairs. (The house was built in 1886.)

Everyone who stayed at the house kept a chamber pot under the bed for nights. It saved a long walk through a cold, dark house. Oh, yes, I am old enough to remember those days.

I've been traveling with my friends, Tom and Chris, from Kodiak. They are lots of fun to travel with, and Tom has been a world-class captain of the ship.

We went to Niantic, Connecticut to have freshwater Niantic River scallops, a fond memory from my childhood.(You know they have to be good if I remember them from that long ago.) After finding three closed seafood restaurants, Tom asked a man outside one of them if he knew where we could find some.

The man said, "No, there aren't any scallops any more." Then he muttered under his breath, "Wouldn't eat them anyway."

As it turned out, they'd gotten scarce, and the season had been closed for a couple of years. As luck would have it, they just opened it again this year, so there were scallops, and we found a place that had them.

The scallops are delicious! They are a bit smaller than our Alaskan sea scallops, and quite sweet. Their texture is really smooth. We had an excellent meal.

This morning we went to the Mystic Seaport Museum before hitting the road for Maine. Maybe later I'll include a few pictures of that trip. Now we are half-way to our Maine destination, and stopped for the night.

Tomorrow we reach the house in Camden, Maine, that Tom has rented for us. Since we will be there for a week, I plan to get a couple more posts on my websites. You folks will probably have to deal with a couple more updates, too. Hope you enjoy them.

Thanks for reading. I'd love a comment from you, especially if you know this area. It is a great adventure for us.