Home stretch [ME]
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Brewer, ME
Maine's been an immoderate overkill of sensory delights [i.e., some of the prettiest riding of this whole trip, and way too much of the best food]. I've kind of been treating it as a a celebration of all that's come before. Go big or go home...and I can't go home.
I've stumbled along a greasy trail of pornographically indulgent gastronomical recklessness [such as duckfat-fried donut holes, distilled carrot spirits...I'll stop there].
This included a visit to La Orilla in Ogunquit [my first destination in Maine, and a town whose name took me longer to figure out how to pronounce than I spent in it], an adorable upscale tapas place that my friend from NorCal and her brother just opened. I got trigger-happy with ordering small plates, wine and oysters while getting 100 pages into a new book that made me laugh out loud with obnoxious frequency [Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, which was given to me in Baltimore]. A very sweet, very intoxicated woman came up and asked me a lot of personal questions, almost cried on me, and declared that my next wine was on her, throwing a $10 onto my table with a flourish before being summoned away by her friend.
I also swam in the ocean [for the record, Maine's Atlantic in June is SO much warmer than California's Pacific] and rolled around in sun-warmed sand, spent a night [getting completely lost] in a thirteen-bedroom mansion before riding onto Portland, where I went to a drive-in for the first time ever for a double feature of one movie I'd already seen, and another movie that I didn't care about at all, which is exactly what I want in a movie that I'm watching as a raucous social activity.
Whatever your opinion of Jurassic World...if you see it in an open-top Jeep underneath the stars armed with beer, blankets, [natural-but-magically-effective] bug spray, and a lot of people who are brashly committed to not taking the movie seriously, it's probably impossible not to enjoy the experience.
Eventually, my body punished me for the digestively ambitious eating. I foresee an impending auto-apologetic juice fast once I get to Reno. Necessarily there was a period of convalescence afterwards [digestive bitters and naps, mostly], during which I made the delightful discovery that steeping lemon ginger tea in homemade miso soup yields delectable gut-cosseting results.
From there, I stayed in a house in Chebeague Island that belonged to someone four social degrees of separation from me [I'd been given a business card shortly before the trip, which turned into my host in Melrose and, then, into the house on Chebeague]; at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound base camp [on my very first day of riding, a girl who works with Outward Bound walked up to me in the Keys and told me to take down her number in case I needed a host in Maine], then in a random patch of lupines [right after watching the Monty Python sketch about the lupine-robber] that I'd been directed to by a bartender in Belfast, where I rolled into town as some local festival was going on [there was a brigade of ukuleles, a concert, and a woman in a photojournalism workshop stopped me to take photos of me and my bike]. There's been a distinctly bookended feeling to my entire trip...a lot of things have kind of come full-circle.
Oh. And, and, and. I rode 80 miles with 3,600 feet of climbing. That's a personal "most" for me [I've done a couple higher-mileage days, but not hilly ones]. Boom!
Also had company for most of my time in Maine since I've run into another guy who's also on a bike tour. First time of the trip I've actually really ridden anywhere with anybody [in terms of actually traveling; I'm not counting day-trip jaunts around town or to the river, or recurrently seeing people in different cities who are also traveling].
From there, carried on to Bar Harbor [Baa Haabaa!] and collapsed in this weird sort of disbelieving euphoria when I got there. Wound up at Coffee Hound, which I am bothering to mention now because I don't think I've ever met friendlier baristas in my life. I ordered clam chowder and a lobster roll, and immediately dropped the lobster roll [they were wonderful and replaced it even though I was about to just pick it up and eat it off the floor]. After I'd already been basically unintelligible, and deliriously fickle enough to ask to change my order to something else [which happened to be cheaper] once I'd already been rung up.
And then spent the last couple days hanging out in a cabin in the woods in Ellsworth, right on a lake, with a couple of rad dudes. Canoed out across the lake to check out an osprey nest. Played lots and lots and lots of guitar, for the first time in months. Played chess, and actually finished a game [it was a great game, too—lasted a couple hours, at least] for the first time in...maybe years? [I'm not good at following through to the end of a game.] Perfect little place to hide out before returning to...Everything Else, I suppose.
Finished A Walk in the Woods today, my very last day of riding. Started The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho, which was a gift from a friend I made back in North Carolina but didn't quite feel ready to read until today.
Today, rode the last sixteen little miles to Brewer, where I am now. Went into a bike shop to figure out how to ship my bike, which was not only way cheaper than flying it, but was pretty much the easiest, most painless thing ever. I didn't have to do anything. I don't know why I hadn't just gotten my bike shipped out to Key West in the beginning, but so it goes.
Treated myself to a cheap motel. I'm fasting for today, which is something I've never done [or felt compelled to do] before. But, for many reasons that I won't go into, it feels like a really good decision today. It's almost 9pm and I'm managing just fine. Kind of crazy...usually I can't even function if I don't have breakfast within an hour of waking up [sometimes half an hour].
And, also, free continental breakfast tomorrow. Boom.
I don't know, man. I didn't model in Maine, nor did I hang out with models or photographers [though I get to see the incomparable Keira Grant tomorrow, which is already a fucking treat in itself because Keira's the shit...with the added bonus that she's game to take me to the airport, even though she's already driving quite a ways to come see me]. And this is, primarily—well, at least right now—a modeling-ish blog [or maybe that's just an excuse, I'm really not sure what this blog is anymore].
In any case, I don't feel inclined to divulge too many of the really confronting and beautiful inner whatevering that I've had going on. Some shit's sacred, yo. At least, it is when it's still being digested. I think I'll be digesting this trip for months to come, if not longer. It kind of hasn't even hit me yet that I don't currently have my bike with me, and that I'm about to be in Reno in two days, and so on. I don't know. Suffice it to say that in the last 12 hours or so, I've been a well of synthesis [not merely antithesis, which is usually where I get stuck]. A lot's happened. Internal, external. And so on.
Oh, wait, I do have one awesome modeling-related thing to mention. In Belfast, I mentioned to a bartender that I'd just biked from Key West [no mention of being a model] and he said, "...This might be weird, but do you know Theresa Manchester? She was here last winter talking about how she had a friend who was about to bike from Key West to Maine."
BAM, synchronicity-machine go!
Speaking of Theresa [who I last saw in Miami, on this trip], she and I will both be in Reno this summer working on Mazu Goddess of the Empty Sea for this year's Burning Man [d'oh...every year I tell myself I'm going to do something else for the summer, but I got sucked into a project again...couldn't resist the crew who'll be working on this, though, which consists of several of my favorite people on the planet].
More on that later, I'm sure.
The program for the next two days: breakfast, Keira [more specifically: Bangor, shenanigans, food, booze, Augusta, airport], two layovers during which I'll probably be fighting down anticipatory giddy-anxiety, arrival in Reno [and into the clutches of a lot of people I love].
