GW wanted an apple

Where you are in Maine today will determine your weather, as is usually the case. We here along the southeastern coast could get temperatures into the low 70s while most everyone else will be in the low to mid 60s. The northern border area will have the best chance for some showers. This coming weekend is looking pretty good.

Except for some necessary very routine trips away from the gator household, I think I’ve been housebound, by choice I’ll quickly point out, for several weeks. Gator Wife has been on the same boat except she does get out a few times a week to work at her part time job.

I’ve kept busy, especially since my new picture scanner arrived and have already converted more than 550 slides to digital format. There are still very many to go; then I have some pictures and negatives I want to convert. My new scanner does a super job printing color negatives out as color pictures.

Yesterday morning when I got home from my senior fitness session, which went quite well, incidentally, WG said it was about time we got away for a short while to break up the monotony of just staying home all the time. She said we needed some apples.

So off we went to find some apples. Now here in Maine it isn’t a very hard task to find apples. Of course they’re plentiful in the local grocery stores, but even local grocery store apples weren’t what she wanted. She wanted some right out of the apple orchard, you know, like the kind one can find at a farm stand.

Naturally, she would have really preferred some of the apples that she could freshly pick right off the tree. But, unfortunately, neither of us would be able to traipse through an orchard to get them. We would have to settle for the ones picked and packaged by the farmers.

Roadside apple stands are abundant here in Southern Maine so finding apples wouldn’t be difficult. We found several, but one in Bethel that suited our purpose. By stopping along the way for breakfast and slowing down or stopping at at every roadside stand we passed, we managed to get to Bethel in just a little over two hours.

To get home, we headed for Gorham, NH, then south on US 16 through North Conway to US Route 302. This is a terrific time of year to drive through North Conway. Although the town did have a considerable number of tourists, we could tell by watching the gawkers along the sidewalks, the road wasn’t crowded and we could get right through.

Before getting to North Conway, we slowed down and contemplated driving up Mt. Washington. It’s been several years since we last took that trek. We decided not to make the climb. But in North Conway a railroad station got our attention. We looked over the brochures there and the maps and decided that the scenic trip through the White Mountain region might very well be a good one if we waited until the leaf-peeping season. We’re waiting.

Heading home we found Maine routes 5 and 113 heading south closed for repairs. Normally I would have taken Route 5, but the detour took us along Route 302 all the way to Bridgeton where we decided to just continue on to Naples and then take Route 114 back to Scarborough.

We got away for a few hours, the routine was broken, and we got some really nice apples. We also got a tremendous “Welcome Home!” from a little Golden Retriever who for one of the few times in her life had been left all day alone at home.

A side note to weatherman Joe Cupo on WCSH-TV: He said last evening that the leaves should be good this weekend in Western Maine and New Hampshire. Well, Joe, we were in those regions yesterday and I seriously doubt they’ll change enough between now and this weekend to be even fair. But I’m not a meteorologist.

GiM