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The Grand Summer Adventure
August/September 2001
August/September 2001
EASTBOUND
The Jeep on a back road in Iowa - westbound - three days from home
(this page is a work in progress...)
(this page is a work in progress...)
What is this?
I like road trips. Over the last few years, I've struck out with little or no notice or planning and headed through the great plains, into the southwest, all over Oregon and Washington and other places. Driving is something that I enjoy and something that gives me time to think, clear my head, contemplate. It is not at all uncommon for me to hit the road for 12 to 14 hours a day and then find a motel or campground in whatever town I happen to be in when I start getting tired. People who say to me "... oh my God, how can you DRIVE for so long, don't you get sick of it?" are usually, I find, people who haven't spent much more time in their cars than the daily commute and going to get groceries or pick the kids up from soccer practice. Almost universally, I've found that they've never experienced a sunrise in the midwestern prairie, nor watched black thunder clouds roll across miles and miles of open country on a late summer afternoon.For me, a long, quiet drive does a few things. It gets me out into the country and across the nation to see different sights, meet different people and experience life outside the "9-to-5." It also simply allows me time totally to myself, when I want to be, with no outside contact other than the gas station attendants that I might meet along the road. There's nothing quite like being virtually alone on the road somewhere out in the rural areas of Wyoming or Montana or Nebraska or parts of Canada - knowing that the closest person or vehicle may be 50, 60, 70 or more miles away.
Plus, have you ever just stood in the Nevada desert in the still early morning and just listened to the silence? When the blood rushing through your inner ear is the loudest sound for miles, and the sun is just coming up over a barren and beautiful horizon, you have the perfect setting for introspection, contemplation and wonder.
The following is a brief account and a few pictures of my latest road trip during August 2001. This trip was also the longest single trip I've done so far and the first time I've ever actually driven from coast to coast to coast across North America. A grand total of 7386 miles - Oregon to Maine via Canada; Maine to Oregon via the Great American Midwest..
This trip was also one that happened in a whole other life and a whole other world. For I returned home to Oregon on the first day of September 2001. Ten days later, I watched CNN with the rest of the world on that horrible morning and said so long to my old life.
Overview of the drive - thanks MapBlast
THE BIG DRIVE - EAST
Now, right off the bat, I have to apologize for a serious lack of pictures overall and a complete lack of pictures from the eastbound portion of the trip. I took the trip to take the trip - the idea of posting it here came along later. The first part of the drive was for me, for my head, for my attitude adjustment. I just plain didn't take any pictures... I'll try to keep my words colorful to make up for that.DAY 1 - 11 August 2001 - Portland, Oregon to Medicine Hat, Alberta
STATS: 814 miles; 15h 10m; avg. speed 54.3 mph; Depart Portland 0500PDT; Arrive Medicine Hat 2110MDT
The day one route
My house - SE Portland, Oregon
The Saturday morning that I left Portland dawned clear and fairly warm. I had spent the better part of the previous three evenings packing up and getting the Jeep ready to go. During those days, I was also prepping work to be without me for three weeks as well, so the stress level was high. I had some idea in my head that I needed to plan this trip for some reason. I had maps, computerized driving instructions, GPS, etc. all packed up and had gone over the "driving plan" a dozen or more times. Maybe it was the length of the trip that had me spooked, maybe it was just stress, maybe it was just me being a dweeb.
You see, normally, I don't plan trips like this. Sure, I have road maps in the car and a general idea of where I'm going and when I need to turn around and start heading home, but I normally don't plan out these trips like the normandy invasion... This time, I had even made hotel reservations at hotels across Canada and had planned the driving days so that I would arrive at each of those hotels at a reasonable hour each night. Man, how anal can you get about a vacation?
Yeah, it was just me basically being a dweeb....
So I strike out from Portland eastbound on Interstate 84 through the Columbia River Gorge . If you haven't seen the Gorge, you've been missing one of the most amazing treats that North America has to offer. What's better is that I entered the most scenic part of the Gorge (at least in my opinion) right about sunrise. What a way to start the trip. It was a pretty warm morning, but I still had a medium weight jacket on and a pair of gloves to keep my hands warm in the wind.
"The wind?" you ask. Take a look at the picture at the top of the page again - the one of my rig on the side of a road in Iowa on the way back west again. Notice that the Jeep has no doors on it. Notice that it has no soft-top, no hard-top. Notice that it only has a bikini and a duster. All of my travel gear is under the duster where the back seat would have been if I hadn't taken it out to fit a backpack, sleeping bag and some other stuff in there. The way you see it above in Iowa is the way it was for the whole trip - all 7300 odd miles of it. What that means, of course, is that on those mornings that I insisted on leaving at 4:00 AM from places in Canada that had suddenly found themselves behind cold fronts that had moved through overnight, I needed much more than a medium weight jacket and a pair of light Mechanix gloves... But more about that later.
Back to the morning of August 11 - I hit my favorite part of the Gorge at just about sunrise. I was about 25 miles east of Hood River and only a few miles away from turning north into Washington State. For me, this part of the Gorge is just simply the most grand, most interesting area. At that time of the morning, before the sun has had time to warm the river mist off of the water, the fog and vapor just hang in between the hills and canyons and give everything a wonderful mysterious look. It's as if a mystical painter came around every day to drape a veil of unearthly light over every tree, rock and ripple of river water.
Funny thing about sunrises, though - they're just so darned brief. There's that one single moment where everything is just perfect and just as it registers in your head, it's gone.
By 9:00 AM, I had reached Connell, Washington and was pointed at Spokane. A quick stop for gas, coffee and a moment to warm up my hands and I was off. These first days, the gas stops were really not much more than pit stops since I was still in this "push-east-fast" mode.
I-90 and Spokane came and went, lunch was a tuna sandwich in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho and another $18 worth of gasoline. Oh yeah, before we go any further, you need to know that you don't want to do a trip like this is a vehicle like this unless you're willing to shell out for gas. I'm not going to give you an accounting of every gasoline stop, but suffice it to say that my total fuel bill for the trip came close to breaking the $1,000 mark...
After having to stop on US-95 in northern Idaho for about 45 minutes while a road building crew finished up a grading project, I crossed the border into British Columbia a little before 2:00 PM. In these "pre 9-11" days, the questions upon crossing were basic, darned near perfunctory and answered in roughly 30 seconds, and I was off through the southern Canadian Rockies and the border between BC and Alberta.
Having never actually seen the Canadian Rockies in person before, I must say that the little sliver I crossed was spectacular. From the US border, I traveled Canadian highway 3 through Fort Steele, Elko and Sparwood BC, then on toward Lethbridge, Alberta. There's a spot along highway 3 just west of Burmis, AB that simply takes the breath away as you cross through some of the most amazing rock formations I've seen, formed by the headwaters of the South Saskatchewan River. This was really the only part of the eastbound trip where a actually regretted not having brought a camera with me. Next trip north, I have vowed to take a dedicated trip back to that area just to experience the scene again.
Lethbridge was my first real opportunity to take out some Canadian cash from a handy ATM, get another tank of gas and swing in to Safeway to pick up something to eat - I got to Lethbridge a little after 7:00 PM, mountain time, but to my stomach it was 6:00 PM back home and time for supper.
Now Lethbridge would have been a terrific place to stop for the evening. It's a nice town and the people were great. There's plenty of hotels and places to stop.
But I had hotel reservations in Medicine Hat for the night, and "The Hat" was still almost two hours down the road. Plus, it was August, the sun was still bright at 7:00 PM and the day had been great so far, so why not push on. I told myself all of this with no real thought of not pressing on to Medicine Hat. Such was the state of me at the time. That's OK, though - wait until you read the account of day two if you think I was slightly insane on day one...
I arrive at a nice little hotel in The Hat at about 10 minutes past 9:00 mountain time. The sun had just set as I entered "The Oil and Gas Capital of the Canadian Plains" and I was ready to settle in for the night.
Not a bad day, day one. On the road from just before sunrise until sunset. Beautiful scenery, good traveling, incident free day.
Sleep.
DAY 2 - 12 August 2001 - Medicine Hat, Alberta to (gulp) Thunder Bay, Ontario
STATS: 1066 miles; 18h 55m; avg speed 57.8 mph; Depart The Hat 0355 MDT; Arrive Thunder Bay 0050 EDT
The day two route
OK - this was just plain stupid. Looking back on it now, with the clarity of 20-20 hindsight, WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING???
The day was great, but almost NINETEEN STRAIGHT HOURS ON THE ROAD???
The reality of what I was doing began to sink in during the last couple of hours that night. I was pushing too hard, doing too much, going to far, NOT having a vacation. What I was doing was basically trying to be a long haul truck driver or something.
Day two put me on the Trans-Canada highway for most of the day. The drive from Medicine Hat to Swift Current, Saskatchewan was a little over two hours of the coldest, most uncomfortable driving I've ever done. Here I am in a Jeep with no weather protection and I'm on the road at five minutes to four in the morning, driving at 60 mph. The temperature hit a HIGH of about 38 degrees that leg of the trip. When I got to Swift Current, I was never so happy to see a diner in my life. I stopped for gas and decided that two hours on the road before breakfast was an OK start to what was going to be a very long day, so I stopped for some coffee, eggs, bacon, toast, OJ and a local paper.
With stomach full of good old truck stop food, and the morning warming quickly now that the sun was up, the next leg of the trip was where I actually found myself relaxing.
Swift Current to Indian Head, via Regina and the Trans-Canada Highway. This is the southernmost part of the great Canadian Plains. This is also the part of the trip where I killed the most fauna ever. I have never in my life seen so many flying insects on one stretch of road. By the time I got to Indian Head, I had places on the front of my red Jeep that were yellow with butterfly wings - and green with the goop inside the butterflies...
Indian Head brought another opportunity to stop and commune with some truck drivers and other really nice folks over a cup of coffee and some toast. 55 liters of gas. $2.00 worth of food, I was getting into the trip finally. But at 10:15 that morning, I simply had no real idea of how far I really had to drive yet that day. I was trying not to think about it, but I had planned this trip out pretty well to the last mile and I knew that I had only traveled about 400 miles of a nearly 1100 mile day, so I couldn't dawdle too long with the fine folks of Indian Head, Saskatchewan.
The vast majority of day two was spent in a nice, relaxing, easy mood. I had plenty of music with me to listen too and had brought my custom audio earmolds to block out road noise so I could actually listen to the music. Traffic was relatively light and I pressed on toward Winnipeg into the early afternoon. A stop in Portage La Prairie put about 62 liters of gas in the Jeep and a chicken sandwich in me, then I pressed in toward Vermilion Bay, Ontario.
I arrived in Vermilion Bay with at least four hours to go to get to Thunder Bay. I arrived in Vermilion Bay a little before 7:00 PM. Or so I thought. One of the things you get used to on a lot of places in the US Interstate system is the little informational signs that normally don't cause a lot of attention grabbing "wow" but are nonetheless very handy. The signs that indicate the change of time zones are some of these kinds of signs...
When I arrived in Vermilion Bay, I didn't realize that I had crossed into the central time zone some hours before. You look at your watch, you reference time to the start of the day or whatever, and you forget that you're traveling enough every day to change times zones nearly every night. What I didn't realize at the time that I hit Vermilion Bay was that it was actually almost 8:00 PM and that I would cross over still one MORE time zone boundary before arriving at my destination for the night.
This is where hindsight kicks in fully. The place I stopped in Vermilion Bay was a little trading post / gas station / souvenir stand kind of place. It was Sunday evening and they had a nearly empty campground right behind the trading post. I had about four more hours to drive. Why didn't I stop in Vermilion Bay for the night??
So, after getting gasoline, a sandwich and a coke, I hit the road again eastbound...
It took another hour or so to get totally dark, then another hour or so before I was alone on the road with just long haul truckers - every one of whom seemed to be driving double trailers, and at well above the speed limit. The last couple of hundred kilometers into Thunder Bay are over some fairly narrow and fairly winding roads, and there was pretty thick ground fog in places that night. As the night air got colder and colder, I started to notice that I hadn't seen any road marker signs for at least two hours that told me anything about the distance to Thunder Bay - let alone whether I was actually even on the road TO Thunder Bay...
The Aurora
Then, as I was freezing my fingers off and cursing myself for having been so stupid to have continued this madness today, I caught something out of the corner of my eye through the trees that just didn't seem right. You have to understand that the section of Canada 11 that runs from Vermilion Bay to Thunder Bay goes through some very quiet, rural and DARK countryside. This night was a new moon and there was no light around except my headlights and the taillights of all the 30 wheelers that were passing me. So to catch some kind of light coming from the woods was odd, to say the least.
I suddenly understood what was happening. I was lucky enough to be out on one very dark night, in an area without a hint of urban light pollution, no moon to spoil things and was being treated to an Auroral display like none I'd ever seen before. As I cleared out of the trees about 150 km west of Thunder Bay, I had to stop and pull over just to savor what I was seeing.
Stretched out before my eyes across most of the northern sky and all the way down to the horizon were thick, ropey curtains of blue and purple light. Every so often, as the solar wind came in a particularly intense gust, the sky would flash over with streaks of reddish white folds and whorls. But behind everything was a continuous backdrop of the deepest azure blue plasma that stretched from the ground up nearly to zenith and across a good 200 degrees of sky left to right. I felt like I was inside a great, silent light storm.
I must have been quite a sight standing there staring at the sky, for at one point, a trucker pulled over to make sure I wasn't broken down - thank you, sir. He seemed kind of confused as to why I would be standing there staring at something that was a common occurrence, apparently, for him. But in my entire life, I've only seen the Aurora Borealis twice - and both times the displays were very high in the sky and partly spoiled by civilization's scattered sky-light. This was like nothing I had ever seen and I wasn't going to drive another foot before I had my fill of this amazing, shimmering fabric of pure energy and light.
After about 30 minutes, the colors started to fade and the sky began to turn dark again. I was standing next to a now very quiet road at an unknown distance from my destination at a time that I thought was about 10:00 at night. Suddenly, the rest of the day didn't matter and I was glad that I had been "stupid" enough to spent nineteen hours on the road. If I had stopped earlier in the evening, I never would have seen this incredible show tonight.
I completed the drive to Thunder Bay with a smile on my face and not really worrying to much about how cold I felt and how tired I was. When I got to the hotel in Thunder Bay and realized that the clock on the wall said 12:50 AM, and my watch still said 10:50 PM, I was surprised, but not overly so. I resolved to pay more attention next time and I went to bed.
DAY 3 - 13 August 2001 - Thunder Bay to Sault Sainte Marie
STATS: 438 miles; 8h 20m; avg speed 60.5 mph; Depart Thunder Bay 1115 EDT; Arrive Sault Sainte Marie 1845 EDT
The Day 3 route
When I woke up on Monday morning, it was about 10:00 AM. I think this day was when I finally got into actual vacation mode and quit worrying about the drive and the hotels and the trip in general. It was certainly the day that I decided that 19 hour driving days just aren't very fun.
I called the next hotel I was to get to that evening - in Montreal - and canceled my reservation. Hallelujah - I think I reduced my "anal factor" by about 95% just by doing that. I would do today what I always had done before on these trips - I would drive until I got tired or until I got to an interesting town and I would stop for the night.
The morning was turning out to be nice and sunny, a little warm and very comfortable. My first task after checking out of the Best Western was to find a good car wash. The amount of wildlife that was splattered across the front of the Jeep was, frankly, alarming. When you can actually SMELL what's left of the bugs on the grill, the front of the mirrors, the windshield, the fenders, etc., you know it's time to get them off. The big juicy bugs are interesting, though, in how they sort of splatter and run in the wind... (yuck.)
I got a lovely tour of Thunder Bay that morning as I cruised around town looking for a self service car wash. When I found one, I suddenly thought "Business Opportunity!" - I bet these kinds of car washes are common in places like Thunder Bay where the winters are real, authentic and serious, but I had never seen one before. The car wash was a basic self serve spray and brush kind of place like we have all over the USA where you plug quarters into the machine and use the "foaming brush" and "power wash" functions to scrub your car clean. But in this case, instead of being outdoors under a canopy and instead of plugging quarters into a machine, you drove into a heated garage through a gate like in a parking garage and took a time stamped ticket. You parked inside a wash bay with all the normal tools that this kind of establishment normally has. You spray, wash, scrub, clean, vacuum, rinse, wax, towel and so forth - all for a flat per minute charge. It was great. I scrubbed the Jeep to within an inch of its life, spent about 35 minutes in the place and paid all of $5.40 Canadian to the attendant on the way out. Man, what a system!! I want one.
After washing the Jeep, I headed east once again on Canada 17 in search of breakfast - or maybe lunch by this time. I found it in Dorion about 30 km east of Thunder Bay. There's a really nice truck stop there in Dorion and they have a terrific little coffee shop inside. I took my logbook and a mapbook inside, grabbed a paper and sat down with a cup of coffee, some eggs and bacon, brown toast (aka "wheat" toast where I come from...) and OJ. I conversed with the coffee shop folks, the truckers and such for a good 45 minutes plus and then decided it was time to hit the road.
The rest of the trip into Sault Sainte Marie was pretty quiet. I only had one gasoline stop in Wawa, and just cruised down the road in the summer sunshine listening to the radio for the rest of the afternoon.
I got in to Sault Sainte Marie at about 6:30 in the evening. Just perfect. Found a room at the Holiday Inn down on the lakefront and sat down in their very nice restaurant for a leisurely dinner. Afterward, I went for an hour long walk along the lakefront and went in search of a couple of "touristy" trinkets to take home with me.
After my huge purchase of a Canada coffee mug, a Canada sweatshirt and a Canada flag sticker for the back of the Jeep, I settled in for the evening and a couple of hours of reading before bed.
Now, this day was what an on-the-road vacation day should be.
DAY 4 - 14 August 2001 - Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario to Burlington, Vermont
STATS: 704 miles; 14h 15m; avg speed 50.3 mph; Depart Sault Sainte Marie 0430 EDT; Arrive Burlington 1845 EDT
The Day 4 map
Day four would return me to the states after traveling through Ottawa and Montreal.
4:30 in the morning in Sault Sainte Marie - I found gas, coffee, a muffin, a newspaper and CNN on the TV in the gas station. Far too American... Too close to Michigan, I guess.
The best part of the day was the stop I made for gas, lunch, etc. in Renfrew, Ontario. I swung into a little convenience store, just like every other one that I had stopped at for gas, sandwich, bottle of water, etc. on the trip and was treated to Canadian hospitality of the finest kind. The gal behind the counter had seen the Oregon license plate on the Jeep and had started up a conversation with me as she was making a turkey and cheese sub for me. Her brother was outside pumping the gas (Ontario doesn't let you pump your own - just like Oregon and New Jersey ... don't get me started!) and it turned out that her older brother was in the Canadian Air Force and was attached to the air refueling wing at McChord AFB near Tacoma, Washington as part of NORAD's joint US/Canadian mission. She and her other brother bent my ear for the better part of an hour while I ate my sandwich. They had both been to visit their brother in Washington state and were amazed at Mt. St. Helens, and the pacific coast, etc. The two were both just so excited to talk to someone from that part of the country. When I went to pay and hit the road, they wouldn't let me pay. They kept trying to tell me that the food AND THE GAS were "on them." I wasn't going to walk out of that store without paying for $35.00 worth of gas and a $3.00 sandwich, so I gave them two twenty dollar bills and told them that if they didn't feel like putting it in the till, then it wasn't my business - maybe they could buy their brother a present or something. Sarah and Tom, thanks for a fun lunch - you're real nice folks. I hope that your brother Will is OK and hasn't gotten deployed to Afghanistan. ..
I cruised through Ottawa at about 2:00 in the afternoon when the road opened back up from the 2-lane that is the vast majority of the Trans-Canada, into a full blast 12 lane wide freeway like I'm used to in the US interstate system.
A word here about a discovery I made on this trip. I discovered that for all the fun I like to have driving in rural areas and heading out into the woods, when I want to get from point 'A' to point 'B' I am a child of the US interstates - thank you Dwight Eisenhower! 2 lane is great, don't get me wrong. I love cruising through the little towns and seeing some of the best of North America that way. But when the twelfth hour comes around on the clock and I'm still doing 40 mph behind an RV, I find myself getting a little antsy... I've become very accustomed to the interstates in the USA. Unless you're on one in a city at rush hour, or traversing one that's perpetually under construction, they're the best thing since sliced bread as far as I'm concerned.
So, speaking of rush hour and clogged freeways, want to know what time I hit the center of Montreal?? Go ahead, guess. Come on - I hit Ottawa at about 2:00 PM, so go ahead and guess when I rolled into the heart of one of the busiest and most crowded cities in Eastern Canada?
4:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time. And at that moment, I went from cruising at about 110 km/h to cursing at about 20 km/h... It had taken me about two hours to go from Ottawa to Montreal. It took me another 90 minutes to get through Montreal and back on the open road south toward NY State...
Not that sitting in traffic in Montreal is all bad. At least you get to practice your French. OK, OK, I know that folks in Quebec are bound and determined not to become anglicized, but I'm still trying to figure out why the rest of Canada is required to print every single sign and label in both english and french, yet in Quebec, you can't find an ounce of English on any sign anywhere to save your life. At least I remembered enough of my Junior High School french to recognize the basic directional signs like "Est" and "Ouest", "Nord" and "Sud." On the road it's also important to recognize signs like "Gardez la droit - sortie 55 - 1 km." But when you see a bunch of orange construction barrels and a flashing road construction trailer sign that says something like "ATTENTION - travail de route en avant. Préparez pour s'arrêter" you just hope that it doesn't translate into "bridge out ahead, stop now or die..." (although I guess that would be more like "Court-circuiter en avant. Arrêt maintenant ou matrice" wouldn't it?)
I like the folks in Quebec, honest. Really. I just need to learn more French.
So I'm sitting in traffic, basically looking for signs that say "SUD 15" (Canada 15 south is the road to the US border and New York.) and enjoying my music and the fumes from a bus in the next lane and for the first time, actually looking forward to getting back in to the United States of America...
I swung in to Napierville, QB a little after 5:30 in the afternoon for my last purchase of Canadian gasoline with pretty much the last of my Canadian cash. I crossed the border into the United States at about 5:45 PM. The crossing process was just as perfunctory as it had been coming in to BC - where do you live, how long have you been in Canada, have a nice day.... Oh, for the old days again.
From Champlain, NY, I took US 2 across the island and lake Champlain to Burlington, VT. Day four ended at a too-fancy and too-expensive hotel near I-89. But, they had a terrific restaurant, so I had a nice dinner to celebrate the near completion of the eastbound half of the trip and to look forward to getting home to Maine the next day.
DAY 5 - 15 August 2001 - Burlington, Vermont to Union, Maine
STATS: 255 miles; 5h 40m; avg speed 45.1 mph; Depart Burlington 0745 EDT; Arrive Union 1325 EDT
The Day 5 route
Ahhhh, New England in August.
The drive through northern Vermont, across New Hampshire and into western Maine is all along US-2 through the old line towns of Waterbury and Montpelier and Barre, Vermont; Lancaster and Berlin, New Hampshire; Bethel and Rumford, Maine. Just before Farmington you turn on to Route 17 and head through Manchester, Maine and on into Augusta, past the dome of the state house.
You pass through some of New England's most "postcard" type scenery here. Every town has its big white church with the big white steeple. Every town has a town square with a flagpole and a cannon with a stack of cannon balls welded together in front of it. Every town has a statue to commemorate those fallen in battles from the revolutionary war all the way up to the gulf war. Every town has a main street lined with old colonial revival and greek revival houses - all painted white, all with picket fences in front.
And on a morning like this one, nearly every town has the smell of freshly mown grass floating through the air mixed in with the wafting scent of hot java and pancakes from the corner coffee shop.
The drive was pretty quiet. Route 2 on a Tuesday morning in August isn't exactly busy. I stopped for my last 15 gallons of gas and a cup of Texaco coffee in Manchester and got into my final push mode to get to the pond. Summer is a great time for road construction in Maine, and this summer was no exception. The state was rebuilding a chunk of route 17 on the east side of Augusta - the line of tourist cars lined up to get through the construction area was massive. But, being that I have traveled this particular part of the state many, many times in the past, I know the shortcuts. I went around the hour-long traffic jam in about 15 minutes and was happily eastbound again - at least for about 30 miles. The next chunk of roadwork had no shortcuts available, so while I sat waiting for a crew to get an asphalt machine moved, I spent some time reading a newspaper that I'd picked up in Manchester.
That piece of roadwork only kept me stopped for about 10 minutes, then I was eastbound again. At least for another 5 miles....
Eventually, I got past the next four construction sites and was finally headed on in to the little farming town of Union, where my immediate family has had land on the pond since 1960 and a house since 1965. My extended family goes back a bit further than 1960 in these parts...
Union is a pretty old town, as American towns go. Originally established as the plantation of "Sterlingtown" and written about in 1940 by Ben Ames Williams' in "Come Spring", the first white settlers came to the area in 1772. It became the town of Union in 1786.
You can read all about the town at the Union Historical Society's website.
It's home to the apparently world (or at least world wide web) famous Union Fair .
Our folks have been around Union and the surrounding towns since at least the earlier 1800's - most were farmers and agricultural hands pretty much right up until the 1950's
So you come into the town from the west and pass through areas of woods and farms and hills and ponds. As I've been coming to this town since I was a baby, this place is the most familiar, rarely changing, comfortable place I know. As I cross the town line, I always get a feeling of happiness, relaxation and warmth. - or maybe that's just because I usually have to go to the bathroom after drinking too much coffee on the road...
I always drive through Union Common on the way over to my parent's house. The Common is the square in the middle of town where the post office is - along with a couple of stores, the laundromat, the library, the historical society and so forth. It's also where the town bandstand is. - and the flag - and the cannon and cannonballs - and the statue to fallen war heroes......
You're only about 15 miles from the Atlantic Ocean at this point of the trip. I've been on the road for five days and traveled all the way from the Pacific Ocean (or at least close) and I'm almost done crossing the continent. But because this is really "home" I suddenly forget all about a great deal of the trip that lay behind me and I'm not looking ahead to the trip that lay before me in about ten days. For now, All I'm looking forward to is going swimming. Did it really take 5 days and nearly 3300 miles to finally get into true vacation mode? Guys who do a lot of motorcycle cruising say that "sometimes it takes a whole tank full of gas before you can think straight" - I blew through a lot more than one tank this time.
Once I cruise through The Common, it's up the hill and around the corner toward the east side of town and my folks' house on Seven Tree Pond.
When I hit the brakes for the last time and turn off the engine, I sit in the awesome quiet of a midsummer Maine afternoon and look at this:
10 minutes later I'm in the water and no longer thinking about driving...
This is the house with that view up there ^:
So, here's the overall EASTBOUND STATS:
Total mileage: 3277
Trip time: 4d 5h 25m
Actual driving time: 61h 50m
Longest day: 19 hours
Shortest day: 5 hours, 40 minutes - the last day
Average speed: 53 mph
Gasoline consumed: 207.83 gallons
Gasoline total cost: $365.49 USD
Average cost per gallon: $1.758 USD
Miles per gallon averaged: 15.77 mpg
Now it's time to stop and relax for a few days by the pond.
Click here for the WESTBOUND TRIP LOG