Thursday was our last full day in Maine, and it was Mer’s day. We had arranged to go to Julie and Paul’s house in Brunswick in the evening for supper. Add to that the fact that my wife likes to see everything, and I figured out, when we were still twenty minutes outside of Brunswick, that we were headed back to Brunswick, to take and finish the campus tour of Bowdoin College .
The tour group looked to be huge, with forty or more people, and I was not looking forward to it. Happily, there were three tour guides, and so the groups split into smaller groups of twelve to fifteen, and each person could choose a guide. Mer, not surprisingly, gravitated toward an English major. We toured around the main quad of Bowdoin, with the guide pointing out various dorms and various department buildings. We went into a science building, and into the student union/fitness center. The fitness center was a gift from the guy who founded Subway restaurants, who had graduated from Bowdoin with a physics major. Mer wanted to know when I was going to found a multi-million-dollar business with my physics degree. The tour lasted about ninety minutes, and we came away with the impression that Bowdoin was very similar to our college, Middlebury College (except we both think Middlebury is prettier).
After the college tour, we drove a very short distance to the center of town, to the Skofield-Whittier House. The house is a Victorian-style house that is now owned my the Pejepscot Historical Society. It had been built by a sea captain who had done well, and handed down through a couple of generations. In the 1930s the last of the family, a young woman, left the house with everything inside, and eventually gave it to the historical society to keep up. As such, many of the furnishings date to 1900 or even before, and the house is in pretty good shape, although the historical society is small enough that upkeep on the house is an ongoing task.
Our tour was excellent. It was just Mer and I and our tour guide. We were taken all around the house and told its history, and I saw at least one newspaper on a cupboard that had a headline about Nixon (the last woman who owned the place did come back from time to time, but changed nothing in the house). It was interesting to see various appliances from the 1920s and 1930s, and the house itself is very pretty.
After we finished the tour, which took about an hour or a little more, we drove over to see if we could tour the Brunswick Naval Air Station, a major air field for the Navy. We got there only to discover that the base had closed (in 2011, it turns out, with the last flight in 2009). It is now open as a civilian airport, but there did not seem to be much to see, and no way of knowing any of the history of the base. So, we moved on.
We headed south toward the ocean and a number of scenic islands that are joined to the main (Maine) land by small bridges.We crossed over Great Island to Orr’s Island, all the way to Bailey’s Island to where the road stops (a gift store called Land’s End). We got out of the car to look around briefly on each of the islands, and wandered around quite a bit on Bailey’s Island. The bridge from Orr’s Island to Bailey’s Island was worth stopping to see. It is a cribstone bridge, which is a bunch of granite blocks just lying on top of each other in a grid pattern. It is the only working bridge of its kind in the world.
We drove back to Brunswick to Julie and Paul’s house, where they had supper waiting. We had a good supper of corn on the cob and chicken, and then we sat in their backyard and chatted. It was a fine evening, and it was a good night to sit out. Julie and Paul’s daughters needed to get ready for bed before the sun set, so we left while we still had some daylight. We decided to use it, and Mer had me drive south to South Harpswell to a peninsula, all the way to where the road ended, with a fine view of the ocean. The sun was not quite ready to set, but it was still very pretty. We did not linger too long, as we had a ninety-minute drive back to Dad’s place, and a start to the long drive back home on Friday. The relaxed evening was a good way to end our vacation.