Category Archives: maine

Thursday 8th September 2011 – WATERFALL

mars hill wind farm turbine maine usaI had another excellent night’s sleep and yet another really vivid dream. As a result I wake up fully refreshed at … errr … 08:30, which, after going to bed at 10:00, is something of a record for North America.

We’re still in wet and clammy weather after yesterday of course but slowly the morning brightens up, and not before time either.

I eventually go round to the garage and have a good long chin-wag with everyone there, and even help Darren MoT a car. Once I’ve done that I head off to Woodstock to try my luck at the council again.

mars hill wind farm new brunswick canada maine usaI’m at a place that’s probably 9 kilometres south of a place called Lakeville on the brow of a high ridge. I’ve no idea how far that is away from where the wind turbines are but you can see them for miles.

It’s a magnificent view though isn’t it? You can see exactly why they installed the wind turbines up there. There’s nothing around for miles to interrupt the flow of wind.

By the time I got to Woodstock I was half a … &#34yawn;" – ed … and much to my surprise the council offices are open.

The girl there is very helpful – tells me some of what I can and can’t do.

There’s a good place to eat my butty down on the river bank and then wander off to do some shopping (well, not much because apart from gas there isn’t anything much else that I need right now) and then back home (and isn’t it nice to be able to say that here in Canada?)

jacksons falls new brunswick canadaI’ve taken a little deviation to the North Branch Meduxnekeag River (and I hope that I’ve spelt that correctly).

The reason why I’ve come here is that I saw a sign down the road pointing this way that said “Jackson’s Falls” and the name looked interesting.

As for the falls – well, I have to admit that I’ve seen better but they do look quite attractive.

dominion bridge company lachine bridge jacksons falls new brunswick canadaThe bridge might not look like very much but what caught my eye was that it carried a maker’s plate, and that’s not something that you see every day.

It was built by the Dominion Bridge Company in Lachine, which is where the rapids are, just outside Montreal, in 1928. And so it made me wonder how people crossed the river back before then. Did we have a ramshackle timber bridge, or did people have to ford the river as best as they could?

And on that note, I could go back home.

0

Saturday 30th October 2010 – TODAY HAS BEEN QUITE CIVILISED …

… and hasn’t it been a long time since anything like that ever happened?

In fact we had a recycling day today and with Darren’s big pick-up truck, Rachel, Hannah and I did a tour of the neighbourhood picking up glass bottles, plastic bottles and aluminium drinks cans.

Once we had a full load on board we went off to a recycling plant in Bath about 10 miles away from here where we weighed it all in.

The plant was quite interesting – it was a simple hand-sorting operation where you tipped out your containers onto a kind-of counter and two people hand-sorted the cans and plastic and they also weighed the glass bottles, not by scales but by eye.

And having seen the price is on offer for scrap over here, not only do I now understand why in several cities that I’ve been to and down several roads that I’ve travelled I’ve seen gangs of people picking up the litter, I’m also going to bring over the scrap aluminium off the two caravans that I dismantled and weigh it in over here.

giant inflatable pumpkin blown away by wind centreville new brunswick canadaIt was quite a windy day over here too and so the highlight was definitely this giant inflatable pumpkin that was busily making a bid for freedom down the highway in the general direction of the USA.

What you don’t see in the photo is the guy from a nearby house who was giving a rather desperate chase after it. 

Thanks in no small measure to the long piece of rope that was tethered to it the guy managed to restrain it but it was touch-and-go at one stage and my money was definitely on the pumpkin.

cadillac convertible centreville new brunswick canadaI was also taken out old-car spotting too.

Darren took me to see his brother-in-law who lives just down the road. He has an old Cadillac convertible that he has restored from a rusty heap and had taken it out for a run-around this morning. And so we headed off down the road to catch him up.

pizza hut houlton maine usaThis evening we all went out for pizza to celebrate Halloween and a good time was had by all. My pizza is the one in the foreground – the vegetarian one without cheese.

If I’m very lucky tomorrow I might get to spend some time with my great-nieces but the trouble with teenagers is that they always seem to have a much different agenda to any agenda that anyone else is ever planning. So I dunno.

Mind you, I have an important decision to make. Do I go out trick-or-treating with Amber and Zoe tomorrow night or do I stay behind with Hannah and hand out the candy?

But all three of them have decided that once Halloween is over I can take off my halloween mask. I don’t seem to be able to convince them that this is my REAL face.

-3

Friday 29th October 2010 – THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE BEEN AROUND HERE FOR A WHILE …

avro lancaster bomber KB882 edmundston new brunswick canada… will know all about this aeroplane as you have seen it all before.

It’s KB882, a Lancaster from World War II and it is one of only three “combat veterans” still in existence. It flew to Edmundston airport under its own steam in 1964 and ever since then it’s been stuck outside in all kinds of weather gradually deteriorating.

I spotted it in 2001 and ever since then I’ve been fighting single-handedly (I do other things with my other hand) to persuade the clowns in whose hands this historic machine has fallen to surrender it up to the Imperial War Museum or some other worthy organisation who can put a stop to this disgraceful neglect and get it back into the air before it falls apart.

avro lancaster bomber KB882 edmundston new brunswick canadaIn 2006 I was told that things might be happening and so being only 150 miles away from it I drove out this afternoon to see what they have done.

And the answer is

  1. they’ve put a better fence around it
  2. they’ve raised it off the ground
  3. … errrr …..
  4. that’s it

What is happening to this machine is nothing short of a national scandal, a total disgrace and the city of Edmundston should be thoroughly ashamed of itself. In the 9 years since I last saw it it has simply rotted away even further.

So having expected that, my blood has been boiling all day and it’ll continue to boil for a while I suppose.


and that’s not all I’ve done. In order to cool off, I retraced my steps from 2001 and retook a few pics of the falls at Grand Sault.

When I was here back then, the falls were all frozen up (mind you, it was midwinter at the time) and so I wanted a few with the water actually unfrozen, as well as a few other photos of interest that I missed when I was up here.

mars hill wind farm maine usaBut I did get sidetracked a little … "no surprises there" – ed.

From Rachel and Darren’s house I could see a pile of wind turbines away in the distance to the north of Centreville and so I wandered off for a closer look. And at one stage I was so close to them that I could almost touch them, and my route towards them led off down a little country lane called Mars Hill Road.

international frontier usa canada maine new brunswick mars hill road upper knoxfordAnd here I came to a dead stop as here on this hill the road also comes to a dead stop.

This is a frontier between the USA and Canada, and an unguarded frontier at that, although I do suspect that the barbed wire, searchlights, man-traps and machine guns are in that forest somewhere and that the purpose of the wind turbines is not to power up the local villages but to power the spy machines lurking in the woods.

abandoned building for sale mars hill road upper knoxford new brunswick canadaThe actual border is that orange fence to the left and this building here, Darren seems to think, might possibly be the old Canadian customs post from when this was a manned … "personned" – ed … crossing back in the distant past.

>And it’s for sale, even though it’s totally derelict. And I have a cunning plan.

Now just suppose I buy it and demolish the property that’s on it. I could erect a huge billboard and use it to display Anti-American slogans and then set up some loudspeakers to broadcast propaganda messages into the USA from here.

If it works for the North Koreans who habitually do this to the South, no reason why I can’t do it from here into the USA.

-8

Thursday 28th October 2010 – AND HERE I AM …

… in the bosom of my family – or at least the friendly part of it.

They say that being an intellectual runs in our family and of course anyone who has ever been an intellectual really had to run, and so it is nice to report that there is a civilised bit somewhere, even if one has to cross the Atlantic to find it.

Strawberry Moose has disappeared of course. I have three great-nieces aged between 7 and 16 and they have already worked out a rota as to whose turn it is to moosenap him for which night and so I don’t imagine that I shall be seeing him again until I go back on the road.

international boundary usa canada maine new brunswick woodstock houltonThis morning though I went into Houlton, which is just across the river in Great Satan.

Its claim to fame is that it’s the town in the USA that has the largest fire brigade per head of population, and when you look at the statistics you’ll find that it’s also the town in the USA that has been burnt to the ground the most often.

Are these facts related, I wonder.

german prisoner of war camp houlton maine usaIt was also the site of a German Prisoner-of-War camp for German soldiers captured in north-west Europe following the D-Day landings and I had to hunt around for hours until I found any trace of that.

But any trace – the site has long since been built over and it’s now a civilian airport and new industrial estate. There is however a little monument to the place as it was, but that’s well-hidden in the undergrowth and I stumbled upon it in more ways that one.

I was talking to Darren and his Dad about the Templars and my theory that Columbus sailed to America to recover the treasure for Ferdinand and Isabella that the Templars had carried across to there when they escaped from La Rochelle in France in the fourteenth Century. We chatted for hours about this and when we returned home,

Darren switched on the TV and there was a programme on the Templars taking the treasure across the Atlantic and the efforts made to recover it. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction at times.

-2