Booth Bay Harbor for puppets?

To find out more about my new friend -- read on!



8:30 AM Hey, it's not raining today... at least yet...

If you checked out the blog yesterday and didn't see any photos for yesterday and Sunday, you might want to go back and check them out - I added photos and info late last night because I had been too tired to the day before.

Can you hear the wind at the window? I didn't think so. Very, very windy this morning.

We plan a 45-minute trip to the coast at Booth Bay Harbor - hopefully to see a puppet performance at Boothbay Harbor's Windjammer Festival. They'll have plenty of wind to jam!

Time for breakfast - catch you later.

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5:30 PM

We did make it up to Boothbay Harbor for their Windjammer Festival. Glad we didn't come up here just for the scenery. Maybe it's what you grow up with, but both of us felt that Door County, the bluffs in LaCrosse, or northern Wisconsin is just as scenic as this area. Can you hear all the Mainers hissing and booing...

By the way, when you are in this part of the country, there is a big difference between Maine Street and Main Street! That is a Payne Free Traveling Tip of the Day.

Boothbay Harbor and its narrow streets were packed with people and cars. Very difficult to even find a parking place you didn't have to pay for. We went to see the Frogtown Puppeteers present "Everybody Loves Pirates" - a show Cassie and I had seen at the Puppeteers of American National Conference in St. Paul in the summer of 2007.

The show was to be held on the lawn, but the weather wasn't going to allow that so everything was moved inside this tiny old library. The room that they performed in was smaller than my classroom at FVL. And they have a huge stage - I bet it is 20 feet long and 6 feet high with lots of props and puppets plus their sound system. I don't know how many people attended but it was wall-to-wall. I would guesstimate maybe 100 kids and adults were crammed inside.



We arrived at 1o:30 to stake out seats for the show slated to start at noon. Good thing we did. Had a chance to introduce ourselves to the puppet team. They were so nice! They even allowed us to videotape the program. It was so good! Fortunately the battery lasted throughout the program - it was 55 minutes. I had a 60 minute DV tape and 60 minutes of battery time. Afterwards they brought us back stage for a behind-the-scenes tour. I even got to try on one of the puppets. We talked puppetry for about a half hour and then let them pack up their show. What fun!

Click here for my Picasa Everybody Loves Pirates web album!

We drove a little around Boothbay Harbor to shoot some photos, stopped at a thrift shop, and then headed back to our hotel in Brunswick. Along the way we stopped for a Dairy Queen break just outside of Bath, Maine. Bath was once the largest seaport on the coast after New York and Boston.

Click here for my Picasa Web Album of Boothbay Harbor photos!

On our way back into town we stopped to get a photo of the Civil War general Joshua Chamberlain for our two history buff sons.



I stopped to asked a student how you actually pronounce the name of the college. Bowdoin College is pronounced "Boe-din" -- he said "silent o". Strange - I wouldn't have guessed that. Did you know their school mascot is the "polar bear" -- because Admiral Perry was a Bowdoin grad. They have a special artic exploration museum here in his honor.

Finally - a correction to yesterday's blog -- the Harriet Beecher Stowe house mentioned in yesterday's blog is not the same as the house we checked in at. That was a typo on the info pack distributed to us. Here is the real place where Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.



Joyce is taking a nap right now while I am typing away. Tomorrow we head back down to Boston area to finish up there. We will have a strategy meeting tonight to figure out the remainder of our trip. We're technically on the way back now...

Blessings to all!

Dad