Tag Archives: Maine

Pictures of the Adventure, The Adventure

It’s a Small World

July 7, 2011 steph 3 Comments

or is it?
Stretching along Rte 1 from Houlton to Presque Isle, Maine, is a 40-mile-long model of the Solar System. The scale is 1:93,000,000. At this scale, one mile equals the distance from the Earth to the Sun. We had noticed Saturn on our way North as we zipped by in the RV –

“Hey, that looked like Saturn back there…..” –
so it seemed like a worthwhile challenge for us to find the rest of the solar system on our drive to the Houlton Fair last weekend.
We started with the Sun – at the center of things.

The sun was represented by this arch in a building at University of Maine, Presque Isle that isn’t open on the weekends, so this will have to do for our starting place!
From there –

Mercury and Venus

Earth with its Moon

Mars

This is Ceres – one of the “new” dwarf planets, and an asteroid belt (both of which seem to need just a bit if lovin’).
But next up is Jupiter, with four moons –

Wow – it’s almost a rest stop!
Ok, next is Saturn (see above :)) and then Uranus –

and Neptune –

And finally – Pluto –

Which is really itsy-bitsy-teeny-tiny…..

Ok, so I suppose this post is a little geeky, but I really found this model fascinating. With a scale of 1 to 93 million, it really puts those high school solar system models in perspective. And then when you think that our solar system is just one tiny part of an amazingly huge (if not infinitely huge) universe, it just boggles my mind. And yet, our little earth is tilted just the right way, with just the right atmosphere that it sustains life. Our life. Us.

I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way?

Yet we’ve so narrowly missed being gods,
bright with Eden’s dawn light.
You put us in charge of your handcrafted world,
repeated to us your Genesis-charge,
Made us lords of sheep and cattle,
even animals out in the wild,
Birds flying and fish swimming,
whales singing in the ocean deeps.

God, brilliant Lord,
your name echoes around the world.
Psalm 8, The Message

Pictures of the Adventure, The Adventure

See you at the Fair!

July 3, 2011 steph 1 Comment

Saturday dawned bright and sunny, and we couldn’t resist the lure of a local agricultural fair. We’ve never been to this neck of the woods (though there seem to be more farms than woods here!), so it seemed to be a perfect opportunity to get a feel for the neighborhood.
So, come along as we explore the Houlton Agricultural Fair.

Before we even hit the midway with all the rides and vendors, we caught the tail end of the Lumber Jack Show.

Besides the log rolling competition, there was some fine chainsaw action, a little wood chopping fun, and a lot of corny jokes. It was a fun way to start the fair.
But the Real Beginning of the fair for us was the Fair Food –

We split the sausage sandwich, so that makes that amazing pile of homemade potato chips (called Ribbon Fries at the fair) a little less troublesome, right? Right? My, they were good!!!
From our artery clogging lunch we headed to the Exhibition Halls. It wasn’t very large, but there were jams and jellies, local art and photography, and a small section for crafts and quilts – 🙂

From the Exhibition Hall we meandered over to the Lawnmower Races.

Wasn’t quite the Tim the Tool Man idea of a souped-up mower, but those boys sure seemed to have a good time “racing” around the track!
Back to the entertainment tent where we witnessed Alexandria the Great escape out of a straight jacket while being bound with chains.

In about 3 minutes, no less. Quite impressive. You could tell she was a trained professional!
Next up was Dan Grady & His Marionettes . At first it was a little odd since he wasn’t behind a curtain or anything, but he did an amazing job with his marionettes. One of them was this flying trapeze puppet –

This is my attempt at a close-up action shot….

“E” for effort?
He had these triple synchronized clowns

that were pretty impressive until they started doing this….

Ok, still impressive, but hey, there are KIDS in the audience. It was pretty freaky!
We left the entertainment area before the Karaoke started, and headed to the livestock area. There were pigs and lambs and goats and chickens and bunnies. My favorites, though, were the alpacas –

There are a couple of alpaca farms close by, so you might see more of these guys this month!
And I couldn’t resist this shot of the bovines –

Someone needs to figure out how to have us walk down a CENTER isle so we have a slightly better view of the cows! 🙂
But apparently the BIG event of the day was the Demolition Derby.
Before –

After –

After the After –

These guys were in the “sedan class” (and had their radiators on their roofs), and are getting ready for the “consolation” round.

Really, this is fun? I confess I’m still trying to understand both the appeal of watching cars crashing into each other and the appeal of actually being the driver of one of the cars. But judging by the amount of hooting and hollering going on around us, the crowd was loving it! Everyone seemed to have their favorites – and the kids behind us were rooting for their MOM who was driving a car in the compact class. If nothing else, there was some great community spirit going on here!

We had a great day at the Houlton Fair. I managed to steer Gary away from the midway (and another order of those ribbon fries) as we walked back to the truck, and by the time we got back to our rig, we were blessed with this beautiful sunset –

Thanks for coming along! Alpacas and Demolition Derbies. Who knew?

Pssst….guess what’s coming up in a couple of weeks? The Maine Potato Blossom Festival! Maybe they’ll have those ribbon fries there too…… 🙂

Family and Friends, SOWER Projects, The Adventure

Catchin’ Up

June 29, 2011 steph Leave a comment

Here we are, sitting in the parking lot of the Wal*Mart in Presque Isle, Maine, getting ready to head into our July project at Baptist Park Camp tomorrow, and I’m realizing I haven’t even shared about our great time at Pilgrim Pines Conference Center. Plus we made a couple of fun stops along the way here to Northern Maine (Aroostook County – the largest county east of the Mississippi – about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined) that I wanted to share so……..
Pilgrim Pines Conference Center

What a blessing it was to work at this camp! First of all we made some great new SOWER friends – John and Joyce M.. Joyce is a professional quilter, so we needless to say, we hit it off right away! Secondly, the work was interesting and diverse – always a good thing! Gary and John stayed busy doing a variety of jobs, from installing lattice around some cabins to building some great new (and very needed) steps to assembling bunkbeds for the living quarters under the new dining hall in the lower part of the camp. (There are actually two camps at Pilgrim Pines. Camp Squanto is their youth camp and until the new dining hall was built, it was a summer only facility.

With the addition of this great new building they now can use that part of the camp all year! The other part of the camp is the Family Camp area – which includes the Mayflower Lodge

several lakeside cottages along with some condo-type housing and several other hillside cottages.)

Joyce and I did a little bit of light housekeeping, peeled some carrots and cut some lettuce, and helped out in the office. But we finished off the project with a whole lot of shredding!

Certainly well within my “skill set”!
The staff was delightful, and while their official summer camp season starts this coming weekend, we did get to see the summer staff arrive and begin their training.

It looked to me like they were all in for a great summer!
Pilgrim Pines also hosts several Road Scholar (Elderhostle) programs during their non-camping season. Those looked very interesting – I might have to do a little more research in that!
Great project, great friends, great blessings! And if you’d like to see some more pictures, HERE you go!
(Of course, another wonderful part of this project was that it was only 2 hrs. from our cabin in Vermont. But if you’ve been stopping by here lately, I think you probably figured that out!!)
We left Pilgrim Pines on Monday and had a nice leisurely drive across New Hampshire and then into Maine.

And since we have some SOWER friends that are also “Maine-iacs” :), we were able to stop and see them along the way. First up were Nancy and Harley, who are parked at their son’s home not too far into the state. The camera never made it out, but we had a delightful visit – meeting some of their family, hearing what all they’ve been up to since we’d seen them last, and enjoying a great seafood dinner at their favorite local restaurant. Yum! We left their driveway Tuesday morning, and started the northward trek.
I guess you know it’s pretty hard to go Maine and NOT stop at LL Bean in Freeport, right?

Freeport is a fun little town (especially if you’re into shopping), but we found other things that were camera worthy (well, at least cell phone camera!) – like these beautiful mountain laurel.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen ones quite that color before!
(Guess what – there are more Freeport pictures HERE – but not too many, honest!)
Ok, from Freeport it was on to our next Sower Stop – Mary and Roy W., just outside of the little town of Clinton, right off of 95. Again, it was a sweet time of fellowship and catching up (we hadn’t seen these folks in a couple of years!). We chatted while we watched the birds at the bird feeder

and ended the day with a stroll over to their daughter’s house to see her beautiful gardens –

(even the cat likes these gardens!).
It was a pretty quick visit, but we’re so glad we stopped! (And if you’d like to see some more bird and garden pictures – HERE you go!)

So that pretty much brings us up to today.

It was nice to break up the drive with visits with friends (and a couple fun stores to boot!), and we’re thankful to have safely arrived in this little corner of Maine. We hit some drizzly rain as we drove north, but it wasn’t until we stopped that the heavens really opened up with heavy heavy rain for a couple of hours. We were VERY thankful that we were sitting still!

Tomorrow will bring a new adventure – the start of another project. Our co-workers this month have been delayed, so we’ll be by ourselves for the first week. But not to worry, I’m sure we’ll be kept busy! And with the holiday weekend, I’m trust there will be some Independence Day activities we can enjoy. Have a nice long weekend, everyone! Happy Birthday, America!

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Tag Archives: Maine

It’s a Small World

See you at the Fair!

Catchin’ Up

Seeing the country……Serving our Lord!

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Seeing the country……Serving our Lord!