Boothbay & Boothbay Harbor

I haven’t yet told you that the first two days of the trip, we did not have electricity to several of our outlets – including the one for the TV. (We do carry an extension cord, mostly for when we are mooch-docking, so we were able to plug the TV in on the opposite side of the RV, where the outlets were working.) With some internet and Facebook research, I figured out that everything that wasn’t working was downstream of this GFCI outlet – which was working. But I figured replacing it might work for the fix. We stopped and got one on the way from Augusta to Boothbay, and I did the install – but no luck, still no power. More on the solution later.

For lunch, we had some great fried seafood from Shannon’s Unshelled – which we enjoyed eating on a picnic table because the weather was perfect! Then it was off to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens – one of the main reasons for this trip. Being mid-August there was still some nice color.

There were the biggest zucchini that I have seen, and the only butterfly we saw was outside the butterfly house. Apparently a goldfinch had made it’s way into the enclosure and eaten all the caterpillars and butterflies.

There are lots of sculptures throughout the park – from the mounds honoring the land, to shiny baubles, to The Codfather and more ceramic fish, to this big,wooden pine cone and these thin columns in a little lake..

There is a fairy village, where people are invited to build houses for the local faeries. We didn’t help, but here are a couple of examples of others handiwork.

There was this little library / reading room and the fence in this area was topped with these kittys.

But the highlight of the park were the 5 trolls created by Thomas Dambo, who is considered the world’s leading recycled-materials artist and is famous for his troll sculptures. They are incredible and very impressive – well worth the two miles we walked to see them all.

Here is Roskva – first seen from afar. Roskva represents the trunk of the tree. And then there is Birk who holds the roots of the trees.

There is Lilja – who holds the scent of the flowers and Gro – who smiles with the leaves of the tree.

Soren stands up for the branches of the tree, and then we finally got a close-up view of Roskva.

After the botanical gardens, we drove around Boothbay Harbor and then around Southport Island. Then it was back to camp for a light supper and a campfire.

We had walking food tour scheduled on Thursday, August 22. It was a beautiful day for a walk. We started with a smoothie and blueberry muffin, tasted a bunch of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, had some lobster chowder and ended up sitting outside at a local brewery. Here are some pictures that I took along the way.

After going back to the Eventide Specialties Shop to buy some of that olive oil and balsamic vinegar – we found a combination that works great as salad dressing – we decided to go on another ride. This time we headed east along the coast and just enjoyed the views. Trish had spotted a homemade ice cream shop in town, so before heading back to the RV, we decided to stop and make ice cream our dinner.