Maine and Vermont figure in my family history and my own experience. My high school teacher ran a summer camp in Vermont and invited me to work there. I did for two summers and had a very good experience. Later, in college, I worked in a summer camp in Maine. It was from there that I launched a bus trip from Portland, ME to Orlando, FL after my girl friend (now my wife of 57 years) complained of the pain and despair we both were feeling and asked me to do something about our job-based summer separation.
From what I can tell, my grandfather's family was based in Maine before some of them moved to Baltimore, much farther south. It may be that bits of speech and accent habits still linger in me from my New England roots.
We visited central Maine. The state has a very irregular ocean coastline and many islands in its waterways and off its shores. Wisconsin does not have any ocean boundaries but we do have the gigantic Lake Superior along the north edge and the equally gigantic Lake Michigan along the eastern edge. Lake currents are not in the league of ocean currents but the latitude of the two states is quite similar. The forestation is similar so the fall colors of the leaves is similar, too.
I saw plenty of houses and businesses that looked like they were having financial problems. Recent data suggest to me that the median income in Maine is not very different from that of Wisconsin but it is true that the reported figure for Wisconsin is higher.
The people we spoke to, both casual and impromptu, and when conducting real business were forthright, cheerful and fun to talk to. Much of my typical day relates not to people or surroundings but to books du jour. I looked for something in my Kindle books that seemed a little different from my recent fare and chose "The Accidental Universe" by the physicist/ humanist Alan Lightman. Lightman turns out to have summered in Maine for decades so I felt on track with him. One of my favorite writers and essayists is E.BWhite and his Maine background is famous.
Our car was a Nissan Altima and one of the models where the remote only needs to be inside the car for the engine button to start the car if in the right gear and a foot is pressing on the brake. Modern cars can be different and we started driving at night. Lynn likes to drive and she is appropriately cautious while being a quick learner. I don't mind if she drives and I use the Apple Maps app to get us where we are headed. I did drive a little but she did most of it.
Maine, of course, is famous for lobster. They even have the lobster on their license plate:
I had a lobster roll, chunks lined up in a hot dog roll, and a lobster quesadilla. We learned that lobster is now considered a high-class food but about 1850 was considered the "cockroach" of the ocean. It was plentiful but looked down upon. Some of the improvement in its acceptance came from cooking the live lobster in boiling water instead of killing it and then cooking it. It is a high protein food and was fed to the state's prisoners so often that there was a riot over too much lobster. So much of it served was called "cruel and unusual punishment". The legislature passed a rule that lobster could not be served to the incarcerated more than twice a week. Lobster has come up in the world since then.
