Friday afternoon we drove the 5 miles to Bath and visited the Maine Maritime Museum. Built on the grounds of 3 former shipyards building wooden sailing vessels…it comprises the property formerly occupied by the Percy and Small Shipyard, the Donnell Shipyard and I can’t remember the name of the third one; all three were adjacent to each other on the Kennebec River.

First up was a tour through the museum where there were all sorts of maritime exhibits. We really liked this ship weather vane

and this model of the Snow Squall, which was the last clipper built in Maine in 1851. She had a worldwide shipping career but was abandoned in the Falkland Islands in 1864 after being stranded and heavily damaged on the rocks near the Strait of Magellan at the southern tip of South America.

The yard was also the builder of the 6 masted schooner  Wyoming

We then prowled the grounds of the museum where there are numerous dories, canoes, lobstah boats and various other small boats. The museum is also the summer home of the Sherman Zwicker, a Grand Banks Schooner which was built in 1942 and fished for cod on the Grand Banks until 1965 before becoming a museum ship. The ship is still seaworthy and sails to Bar Harbor for the winter since the Kennebec freezes over. Cod fishing was via long lines which were deployed by 12 dories from the schooner…once the cod were onboard they were filleted and salted to preserve them then stored in the hold until return to port.

We also saw a woodchuck on the grounds but his picture came out kinda of blurry…but I’ll put it in anyway since it’s the first wildlife we’ve really seen up here in Maine.

All in all a pretty decent afternoon. A beautiful, sunny day in the life of an RVer. For dinner we had some Four Cheese Ravioli with chicken and a garlic/lemon/wine sauce. Yummy.

This morning Neil went on a run and we planned out our route to Trenton, Maine to visit Acadia National Park. The GPS originally wanted to take us straight up US-1 about 120 miles total but a lot of it is on a twisty two lane road. Neil thought the 145 mile route up I-95 through Bangor looked better and after making sure that the GPS was in truck mode it agreed with him…so we’re going that way as freeway driving is so much less stressful than twisty two lane roads. There’s still about 20 miles or so from Bangor down to Trenton but there’s no way around that.

In the afternoon we took a drive down to Bailey Island. This was the beautiful view over Mackerel Cove as we drove down the center of the island.

Next was Lands End including the Maine Lobsterman Memorial, the wood-like bedrock coastline and several more beautiful views over Merriconeag Sound off the western and southern coast of the island.

Tomorrow we head off to Trenton for 10 days at Timberland Acres RV Park and Acadia National Park. Looking forward to being there…lots of great hikes and views to see and hopefully moose as well.

Cyas.