Mackworth Island and Oops Moon
17 July 2026
June 3 was our last day of vacation. It was a clear day. This was the view of Casco Bay from our hotel room window.
We started the day by getting to two out of the three bookstores that Jack regularly visits. The second one is at the foot of Munjoy Hill, so I left Jack there and trudged up to snap a few photos of the park by the bay.
The houses on Munjoy Hill that overlook Casco Bay are out of my price range.
Near the top of the hill there's an observatory I ought to get to one of these days. From this angle, it looks like a Dalek.
"Exterminate!"
I stopped in a coffee shop on my way back down. I needed some cold caffeine. The shop wouldn't take tips, insisting that their workers were paid fairly.
We fetched the car out of the parking garage and drove north to meet a friend in Falmouth, one town north of Portland, for lunch.
What was the difference between Falmouth and Portland generally, I asked.
"More money in Falmouth" he answered.
"Ah. Like Princeton and Trenton."
"Not that bad," because he lived in Princeton (and sold his house to my boss; small world).
Mackworth Island State Park was on the way back to Portland. The trail on the perimeter would be a short, easy walk.
A causeway connected the island to the mainland. There were reasonable-sized houses on the road that led to the causeway on the mainland side. I played the real estate game in my head and decided I could live in one of those.
We began our walk counterclockwise around the island.
There is a school for the Deaf in the middle of the island.
There are "fairy houses" along the trail. I was expecting something more like the gnome homes on the Columbia Trail. This was lame compared to that.
I walked out onto a pier. There were two people at the end of it, in towels. Before I had a chance to get my camera out, one of them dived into the water and swam to the shore (brr!), where a tall staircase led back to the pier.
We came upon a pet cemetery.
Near that was the fairy village, where one was welcome to build a fairy house.
Okay. Whatever. You do you, Mackworth.
For dinner, we went back to Central Provisions, where we'd gone last year. The only seats were at the bar, facing the open kitchen. The server asked if there were any dietary restrictions, and when I said I was vegetarian, they brought what amounts to an annotated menu. I suddenly remembered that from last year; the regular menu descriptions are deceptive. "There's chicken stock in a lot of things," the server explained.
When the moon rose over Casco Bay, I asked Jack to turn the lights off so I could try for more pictures.
This photo was a mistake, obviously, but I like it anyway.
I gave up and we turned the lights back on.
These were worse than last night's.
I gave up and we turned the lights back on.
In the morning, I watched some herring gulls on the roof.
The drive home was uneventful. The cats were happy to see us.
I returned to the lab four days later as a "casual hourly" part-time employee to discover that my department's HR person hadn't bothered to enter me into the system. "I was waiting for you to get back from vacation," she said. If I hadn't been proactive about my building access and email account, I would have been frozen out completely. It took two weeks of my working for free to get the paperwork sorted. I did get paid for my time eventually. It was weird being back, because when I wasn't there, I was alredy forgetting what day it was. That it's July 17 and I'm just now finishing up posts that ought to have gone up in early June tells you all you need to know about whether or not I've been keeping busy.
