Day 69, Bridgton to Brunswick, 61 miles

Today was climbier than expected and featured a headwind, and I was grouchy about it.

It started great! I woke up to beautiful morning at Linda and Jan’s, and they made me coffee and a breakfast of all kinds of fruit and yogurt. We talked home rehab, getting Big Linda out for a visit, and the NYT games array. Then they filled my water bottles (and added ice!), and I headed out into the day.

The grades are steep, and there are lots of turns—downhill momentum doesn’t get me far. The country roads the route takes—now Bike Route 1—are named things like Snow Hill Road, Range Hill Road, Fox Ridge Road, Bald Hill Road…you get the idea.

When all is said and done, I climb 3600+ feet—nearly as much as yesterday with its last mountain—without ever breaking 600 feet of elevation. I have few photos because I was pretty much always going up a hill, recovering from a hill, or going down a hill. Unlike my Adirondacks days, where the downhills felt longer than the uphills, today it feels like I’m always climbing and have always been climbing. The headwind doesn’t help, and try as I might I can’t seem to break my lousy mood.

I also still had no reception and couldn’t get my accommodations for the night squared away, which left me anxious, particularly since I’m in the only area where the ACA map affirmatively recommends reservations.

So I did what there is to do in this situation: I pedaled.

And the same thing happened that always happens when when I do that for long enough: I arrived. I got to Brunswick and finally had cell service again. I was able to call the campground and confirm there were spots and make a reservation (an amusingly inapt concern, as it turned out when I arrived soon after—the tent area was nearly deserted).

Thomas Point Beach Campground was a kind of strange place, with a central plaza featuring a train-car snack shop and other whimsical amenities.

But the tent area was in a quiet pine grove apart from the rest of the place, and there was one other tenter all the way at the other end (and a guy who came and sat in a camp chair for an hour or so, then left).

And, as Andrew excitedly pointed in a text that slipped through during a blip of service during the day, I hit coast today! I hadn’t even realized it was the day. But I did, and my campground was on water, and I smelled salt air and I walked by salt marshes and the beach and dipped my feet in the water and tasted it, and it was salty, and holy crap I hit the east coast.