This was the second-to-last painting of our Alaska-Canada trip. The grillwork of a Model T glowed faintly in the gloom of the open door, but I was more interested in the way the buildings settled in amongst the trees.
The property owner came over to chat. He knew exactly where I live because he visits the Owl’s Head Transportation Museum. He invited us to lunch, little knowing that for thousands of miles, Mary and I had fantasized that someone, anyone, would offer us a home-cooked meal. And this was the one day when we couldn’t accept, because we had a strict timetable.
And he had leftover pie. Geesh.
Mary had mislaid her wallet in Fort Nelson, British Columbia. It was mailed back to Rockport, so she had a photo of her license on her phone for the tail end of the trip. Still, I insisted on driving the Calais-to-Rockport leg (for one thing, the Airline runs through moose country and we were traveling at night). Just before we hit Bangor, we stopped for gas. A man with no front teeth made a pass at Mary. “Ah, it’s good to be home,” she said.
We passed Searsport, Belfast, Lincolnville, and Camden, each in turn glowing gently in a light rain. Then we climbed the last rise up Richards Hill and were home. We’d driven 9887.9 miles from Anchorage to the Arctic Circle to Newfoundland and then back home to Maine.
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In 2016, my daughter Mary and I set off across Alaska and Canada on a Great White North Adventure, which you can read about starting here. We arrived in Anchorage at the beginning of September and got home in mid-October. In between, we visited every province but PEI (been there, done that), and Yukon Territory. In retrospect, it might have made more sense to do this during the summer, since Alaska and Canada threw a mess of strange weather at us.
