Acadia National Park

Spent the Labor day weekend gawking at Acadia National Park’s glorious seashore. Stayed in a charming farmhouse-plus-yoga-studio in Brooksville in the company of a very likable, very smart cat named Felix, drove to Acadia (43 miles away) and was enamored by the countryside. This was my first time in Maine, and OMG the state is beautiful, modest, welcoming and definitely warrants going back for gawking all over the place in more careful detail.

Getting out of Maine on Labor day morning (a beautiful, foggy morning) was painful though, due to the long weekend: spent quite a bit of time in the slow-moving traffic on I-95 that was many, many miles long, finally gave up, and took the first exit to take a longer route back. (Maine isn’t called “vacationland” for nothing.) This is why the US should give trains a serious thought, I suppose: surely the US is a huge country, and installing railroads everywhere at this point might not be feasible, but spending so much time on goddamn driving just about everywhere isn’t a worthy human endeavor, in my opinion.

(Been thinking of writers here: Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, likened watching the world passing by through car windows to watching television; Steinbeck, in Travels with Charlie, said that it is possible to drive all across the US on freeways without seeing the country at all.)