Good friends and good times.

We left Gateway to Cape Cod on Thursday and drove to another Thousand Trails Park, Moody Beach, in Wells, Maine.  We had considered going to Boston while we were in Rochester, MA; but we had visited about all the big cities we wanted to on this trip.  In fact, we drove the long way around Boston via I-495 to avoid it and the traffic completely.

At the end of I-495, we got back on I-95 North to Maine.  We drove through New Hampshire, all 18 miles of it, and then on to Wells, Maine.  As usual, we checked in at the office, disconnected the car, and drove through the park to pick our site, and decided on site #185. 

With the exception of meeting Ken and Bonnie in Pennsylvania, something that has been different on our New England journey is that we have not met as many new friends as we did during our Florida trip in the winter.  I think part of the reason is that we have been sightseeing a lot more and we have not stayed more than just a few nights in any one location, with the exception of Mosquitoland where no one ventured outside.

That all changed at Moody Beach.  I don’t know what was so different about this park from the others.  Everyone was so nice and wanted to get to know you (as we did them).  We made LOTS of friends at Moody Beach:  John & Lorraine, Joe & Janice and his family, Don & Jackie, and many, many others. 

John and Joe and their families spend their summers at Moody Beach.  Don and Jackie were full-timers (like us) who gave us a lot of very good information about traveling to Newfoundland and Alaska. 

Some other friends we met while we were there taught us how to play pickle ball which is a cross between ping pong and tennis and a lot of fun to play.

On Friday, John took us on a bike ride along the coastline in Wells, and very patiently, let me stop and take as many pictures as I wanted.  The coast was lined with beautiful beachhouses.

The tide was out on our way up the beach.

We pulled over and walked out to the beach at one spot.

The beach was rocky in places…

…and sandy in others.

There were some rocks way off shore where John told us that sometimes you could see seals swimming around.  We didn’t see any today though.

We rode our bikes until we reached a canal lined with big granite rocks where small boats would come in and out of the harbor.

The fog started to roll in while we were there.

This couple was determined to enjoy the beach despite the fog, wind and cool weather.

We were amazed at how fast the tide comes in.  Those same beaches we had stood on just an hour earlier were full of water and waves when we came back by an hour later.  We had a very strong headwind on the ride back that made it very challenging but as soon as we turned away from the coast and got back to the campground, it had almost died down completely.

Later, that evening, John invited us to go with him and Joe for ice cream at Shane’s on Sanford Road.  Of course, we NEVER turn down ice cream.  It was delicious.  I had a brownie sundae while Chuck had good ol’ butter pecan. 

After we left Shane’s, we rode down to York and Ogunquit and got to see some more interesting sites and people.  They took us to the Nubble Lighthouse at Cape Neddick which is still a working lighthouse.

John (or Joe?) told us that the Nubble Lighthouse is the most-photographed lighthouse in Maine.  After seeing it, we could understand why.

There was a bucket that ran between the lighthouse island and the mainland (look to the far right of the picture.

While it was intended to be used to only transport supplies, I read on the internet that one lighthouse keeper would put his children in the bucket each morning to send them on their way to school. That changed when his boss later saw this picture in the paper.

(Picture from Lighthouse Digest)

The ice cream and lighthouse tour with John and Joe was not only fun but necessary.  Why?  It took 2 hours of riding around in a truck together for us to finally begin to understand one another.  John and Joe and their families are from New England – more specifically, Massachusetts.  And Massachusetts English is a whole lot different than Southern English or Tennessee English.  For one thing, New Englanders basically only use 25 letters of the alphabet.  They never use the letter “R”.  They eat “lobstah” and drink “beeyas” and drive “cas”.  On the other hand, as Joe pointed out to us, we Southerners make up for their disrespecting the letter “R” by adding it to words like when we “warsh” our clothes. 

(We later discovered that the further up the Atlantic Coast you go, the letter “R” diminishes completely.  Our next stop was going to be “Bar Harbor, Maine”.  After arriving, we discovered it is actually called “Ba-Ha-Ba.”)     :)