Once we got through Boston and headed North towards the state of Maine, everything changed as the sky cleared and the sun shone. We drove for 3 hours along 3 and 4-lane open roads and enjoyed the New England Fall colours coming back to us again. We were heading for our log cabin.During our trip-planning, we'd trawled the Internet trying to meet Nicki's wish-list for the cabin After hours of looking at site after site, we finally we found The One 6 weeks ago. As we drove closer, I hoped the pictures on the website would reflect reality.
We left the Interstate and drove onto onto US-1, a lovely calm road lined by carefully tended houses and rough shack-like stores (“Ed's Stuff” was one of them, the frontage a mishmash of useless and incongruent stuff, like used tyres and birdcages). Seeing signposts to typical English places like Falmouth, Sandwich (East and West), Newcastle and Salisbury is something we should have expected, it being New England, but it still made us smile each time a new sign to a familiar town name in unfamiliar territory appeared.
30 miles from the cabin, we stopped at a supermarket and got our second shock about prices of food. We had done our first shopping in a supermarket on the edge of New York and put the higher-than-UK/NL cost down to the proximity to NY. Now in Maine, we saw standard wholemeal bread loaves for nearly 4 dollars, a can of soup was around 3 dollars, as was cauliflower and broccoli. Maybe we just went to the wrong supermarkets but it really shook our image of the cost of food here.
As we drove into Boothbay mid-afternoon, Nicki saw a lovely stretch of water and said, hopefully, “Is that our lake?”. The SatNav said 1 mile to go. We arrived at the cabin after a few twists and turns off the main road and sure enough, it turned out to be all the things we had hoped for – comfortable, cosy,
secluded, surrounded by a non-pine forest and overlooking a lake. To see natural wood everywhere you look in the house is a warming feeling. We have a log fire stove, plenty of space, nature all around, and complete peace and quiet.Isn't it strange how difficult it is to describe complete happiness? Describing flawed joy is so much easier. This cabin is about as close to complete happiness as I have ever known.
