2018 Jul 27-Aug 4 Maine Motorcycle Trip

We left Appleton early in the morning on Friday with the goal to make it to Dearborn, Michigan and take Kyle out for dinner. The Stumpf's joined us again for this adventure and we trailered our motorcycles again; Fred and Karen supplied the family van as the tow vehicle. Well, traffic in Chicago was our challenge and our dinner plans were delayed until nearly 10:00pm. We were able to have Kyle meet with us for dinner at a Mexican restaurant of his choosing which was great. After Dinner, we had to say good bye to Kyle and headed on into Canada crossing over the Ambassador Bridge. We stayed the night in London , Ontario arriving quite late.

On Saturday, we hit the road for a few hours and stopped in Kingston. Kingston was a great little waterfront town and we enjoyed walking around a cute little lakeside railroad stop and of course, enjoyed some ice cream.

Our target destination for Saturday was Lincoln, New Hampshire where we had hotel reservations for the first and last night of the trip. This brought us through Montreal where traffic really sucked! We had guessed that traffic may have cost us 2 extra hours!

So vacation was to begin Sunday morning waking up in Lincoln where we planned to park the van and continue the rest of the trip on our motorcycles by driving through/across the White Mountains. At least…that was the plan!

We left our Days Inn hotel and got on the interstate the wrong way (smile!). We drove total of 24 miles but it was 10 in wrong direction so 10 miles back to our starting point. From there we made it the 4 miles to the exit for us to take Hwy 112 across the White Mountains. Our challenges began there where, when the light at the offramp turned green, we heard a very odd noise. To jump to the end of the story, Fred and Karen's motorcycle threw a rod and blew the engine. Of course, we didn't know it at that time and this started a bit of a frenzy for us to get the motorcycle back on the road.

Thankfully we were only the 4 miles from the van and trailer so it was easy to put Fred and Karen's motorcycle back on the trailer to find a place to fix it. We had a lot of disappointment but Tim and Roxanne drove the motorcycle to chase along. We headed to Lewiston, MN and then Bangor, Maine as there were a Yamaha dealers there that we had hoped might be able to take a look at it. Most of the motorcycle shops were closed on Mondays .

While in Bangor, and to make Tim happy, we had to seek out the house of Stephen King. We found it! What a cool old house but our pictures weren't great as they were paving their drive way that day! :-)

Both motorcycle dealerships made attempts to look at the motorcycle but the outlook was not good. So as to continue our vacation, we all agreed to put both motorcycles back on the trailer, leave the bikes at the dealership in Bangor, and continue our vacation in the van which is what we did.

Our first destination in the van was Fundy Canadian National Park in Alma, New Brunswick. Fundy is known for the dramatic difference of low tide and high tide. We made it to Alma to see the low tide at 9:00pm. After walking around a bit, we stumbled to Greco pizza to catch dinner before they closed at 10:30! We learned about an Altantic Coast/Canadian favorite..something called a Donair sandwich.

While in the Fundy National Park area, we stayed at the Amsterdam Inn, walked the bay floor at Hopewell Rocks and then headed back to Alma to see the high tide which was 46 feet higher than it was when we were there the night before (we had a full moon). We stumbled on a group of people who Fred and Tim met at the Tipsey Tail having afternoon beer. Phil and Huey, along with their wives (Phil Johnson and his wife Marion; Huey and Roxanne) joined us for a couple of Red Rhonda beers at the Holy Whale Micro Brewery which was an old church and then, upon their recommendation, we made sure Karen tried lobster at the Alma Lobster Shop. She didn't quite get the "full" experience as they didn't give her a lobster bib!

Eventually we made our way to St. Andrews, New Brunswick which was a great little seaside town. We got there a bit late (9pm) and the entire town was already in bed! The next day we took a Zodiac whale watching tour (Tide Runner); our tour was led by the lead marine biologist from some local government research facility. We had fun chasing around looking for whales. Pat, our guide found us one huge Fin whale and lots of Minke whales.

On Thursday, we made our way back into the U.S. and went to Acadia National Park. We traveled the entire route around the park and had a great day. We eventually spent the night in Augusta, Maine.

On Friday, we hit the road headed back toward Wisconsin at about 9:00am and left Maine at 11:00am.