rain, rain, go away...

posting 8/18 am ... raining here in arcadia, maine! doing laundry and internet at the library - supposed to clear up by noon. here's what i wrote up last night:

Sorry, it’s been a while since I was able to blog. I’ve been hiking the Appalachian Trail. Last I left you, I was in a bullet-ridden motel in Michigan. (Well, OK, I exaggerate a bit…)
As planned, I crossed into Canada and headed towards Buffalo. About 40 miles short, though, I came across an Ontario Provincial Park on Lake Erie that looked promising. Supposedly there was hiking there, although that didn’t pan out. Still, I was able to get a few miles in that evening.
At $27.75, the price was a bit steep for what I was getting (no shower, for example), but it was quiet and peaceful. And I was able to dip my toe into #4 of my tour of the Great Lakes. The weather continued to be in the mid-70s, as it’s been for over a week up here. Pleasant, but I’m ready for some summer temperatures.
This provincial park has some 350-million-year-old fossils on the rock shelves along the lakeshore, and there are so many that they don’t even bother to keep people off of them. This was apparently an inland sea at that time and the fossils are from a coral reef. Pretty cool…
I managed to hike all the trail they had and some of the roadway as well, to work off my Pasta Santa Fe dinner. (Truly amazing what they’re doing with freeze-dried camp food these days. And my jet-boil cooks up water in less than 2 minutes.) I got about 4 miles in but didn’t see anything majorly interesting other than the pile of dead fish they’d dumped out along the boundary line. Walking along the lakeshore there was a lot of dead fish, big ones, so I guess they scoop them up every so once in a while. I don’t know my fish so couldn’t say exactly what they were, but I did see something that was like a carp or maybe a catfish. And several others had a snout-nose sort of like a pig. Anybody have any idea what those were?
Instead of crossing the border into New York, I decided to head out along the north shore of lake Ontario hoping to enjoy some good lake views. What I discovered, though, and I’d seen this along Lake Erie as well, is that there is no perimeter road running along the shoreline. Along most major lakes in the US you generally have a road that runs close to the shoreline, allowing access to private homes, B+B, resorts, etc. Apparently not so in Canada. I did manage to sneak out to the Lake Ontario shoreline and complete my ceremonial toe-dipping.
After passing Lake Ontario I continued on up the road as it paralleled the St. Lawrence Seaway. I camped that evening near the Ontario / Quebec border, pitching my tent literally 10 feet from the lapping waters of the shoreline. (The river was 7 miles wide at that point so they called the bulge a lake.) Fell asleep to the sound of the waves hitting the bank…in lieu of a hike (again no trail) I had to walk back to the highway interchange, about 6 miles round trip, and grab dinner. A net calorie gain, I’m afraid; I had a bacon cheeseburger at Dairy Queen.
Crossing the Quebec border, I stopped seeing road signs in both English and French. It seems that the Quebecois are not fond of the dual national languages of Canada! (Frederic, I could have used you, especially driving through Montreal!) I managed to make my way to the small border outpost I’d selected in Maine. Unfortunately it was so small that they hadn’t had their excitement for the day, so for the second time this trip I was detained while they tore my car apart. The border guard (who weighed about 350 lbs – what an embarrassment to people visiting America for the first time! talk about stereotypes…) was quite disappointed he couldn’t bust me for something. I guess I’m lucky he didn’t plant anything, since he wouldn’t let me outside while he searched the car – which I know is a clear violation of Customs rules; I’m definitely allowed to observe – if nothing else, to protect them from accusations of stealing anything.
Anyway, I got through and about 35 miles down the road, managed to intercept the Appalachian Trail near its beginning. Just to say I’d been on it, I hiked about 6 or 7 miles. Now, if I can just find time to do the other 2000…
At the conclusion of my hike, it began to rain buckets. I wasn’t really ready to stay in a motel, since I’d had a shower in camp that morning, but could find no campgrounds along my route. So after a pretty gnarly drive I pulled into Bangor, Maine and found a not-so-cheap motel room. Got cleaned up and a good night’s sleep, and it put me just 50 miles from my next destination, Acadia National Park. And given that it was Friday, that was a good thing – as I’d noted in earlier blogs, the campgrounds really fill up quickly on Fridays and Saturdays, especially near major population centers. Accordingly, I sped down the road and managed to procure such a good spot at only $14 that I decided to stay in the same place for TWO nights, a first for me.
No doubt, Acadia National Park is my second favorite place on this trip, after Glacier. It has tons of hiking, the campsites are pretty cool, and the watery scenery is awesome. As bad as the weather’d been the night before was how nice it was this day. After setting up camp I drove to Bar Harbor and had a deli sandwich for lunch and sat out of the deck. Afterwards I had a fantastic 10-mile hike that just kicked my tail, even though it topped out at about 1500 feet – the way the loop worked, it seems I had to climb most of that 1500 feet several times. I met someone up top that had been coming here for 30 years (his daughter lives on one of the private islands, and he himself “summers in the Hamptons” – I think they’re old money) who gave me some good tips on things to do. As I write this, tomorrow I’m planning to take one of the mail boats out to a couple of the public islands and hike around.

addendum: i just saw an email from the guy who was hiking with me in glacier. he sent me a website with the photos from his trip, which includes the hike we were on. here's the link: http://picasaweb.google.com/jon.hiller/GlacierNP