Though we have found Bangor, ME, to actually be quite a bit nicer than we expected, it’s not so action-packed a place that we felt the need to operate at our usual death-march vacation pace.  So, it was 10:45 before we rolled out of our rental apartment and headed north to Orono, to finally check out the place where Zoe will be living in about three short weeks.

Zoe and I had visited the campus once before — during a cold, rainy, muddy day in March just as everything was shutting down — and the rest of the family hadn’t seen it at all, so we were looking forward to visiting on a nice summer day.  The campus didn’t disappoint, although the ghost-town level of emptiness was a bit eerie.  We were able to locate (though not enter) Zoe’s dorm, nearest dining hall, and the locations of the limited number of in-person classes that she’ll have.  (At the moment, her schedule is over half remote, but luckily she does have at least some in-person classes.)  The one building we were allowed to go inside was the Center for the Arts, because the museum of Native American art and artifacts was open.

Skipping stones on the Stillwater

The campus runs along the Stillwater River, which provided a lovely peaceful spot for an afternoon walk.  The nearby downtown, though about the same size as Durham, managed to offer several dining choices — and most of them were NOT pizza!  We saw at least three brewpubs in Orono (and several more within walking distance of our apartment in Bangor).  We’re not sure why Durham seems unable to pull this off.

Ice cream break at the Family Dog

Fortified with a long day’s walking (as well as burgers, local beer, and ice cream), we had one last stop to make before returning to the apartment.  A short walk away from our downtown Bangor apartment is the famous home of Stephen King.  Just in the brief time we were there, on a random Tuesday afternoon, we saw several other groups coming to stroll down the historic street and peer through the iron gates at the King mansion.  In addition to the cool gates, the main attraction is a carved stump that is supposed to represent a lot of King’s books.

Our neighborhood has lots of nice options for dinner.  Tonight we chose a noodle shop that the kids had seen on our way in.  After stuffing ourselves with noodle bowls, we felt the need for a good long walk (or at least, most of us did — there was a small contingent that instead felt the need to lie on the couch and watch TV).  Our main observation was that Bangor has a lot of hills.  In a few places we thought we were back in San Francisco.

Is this a lovely European piazza? No, its Bangor, Maine!

We are still trying to follow safe practices, and we have not actually been completely sequestering in our house for quite some time, but this is our first blog-worthy, whole family adventure since Nadia’s big birthday trip. We’re in another state, even.

Maine obligingly lifted quarantine orders for New Hampshirites several weeks ago.

Aside from escaping cabin fever, we are also are planning to acclimate ourselves to Zoe’s soon-to-be new home on the U Maine Orono campus.  Jen and Zoe are the only ones who have seen the campus; they squeezed in a visit mid-March just as the school was shutting down.

Before we could get there, we undertook some retail therapy, and maybe even below-retail therapy at the outlets in Freeport.  The LL Bean factory outlet, Old Navy, and the Nike store all benefitted from our visit.  We also managed to visit our first microbrewery of a trip that promises many more microbreweries.  Maine likes its craft brew.

This broke the drive up into nice, manageable chunks.  An hour-and-a-half to Freeport; a few hours of shopping; then an hour-and-a-half drive to our final destination of the day: Bangor.  Aiding the drive was  a very ineresting RadioLab episode about the long-term effects of the 1918 Pandemic.  Did you know that both Ghandi and Hitler got career boosts from the Spanish Flu?

Bangor turns out to be charming city combining aspects familiar to us from our stomping grounds of Dover and Portsmouth.  It’s a fair bit grittier than Portsmouth and a few notches hipper than Dover.

Texting whoopie pie menu and expecting a rapid response

Dinner on Bangor’s Market Square. The restaurant makes its own beer.

Bangor lumps both those places together, with an ample sprinkling of microbreweries — we’ve found four here without really trying — and a mix-in of whoopie pies.

Jen has found us a nice, central Air Bn’B apartment, and later she figured out how to text the whoopie pie bakery menu to the girls and collect their order.  (I opted for the “Down Easter,” which has molasses cake and blueberry cream filling.)  Jen’s a hero of this trip.

She was rewarded with a round of Terraforming Mars before road weariness took its toll on all of us.

Tomorrow we visit Orono.