Dear Readers: I’ve managed to slip away on a brief summer vacation, allowing you – through the good graces of your editors – to joyously relive one of my old ones!

We’ve just returned from our summer vacation, and I’m still hearing that sticky rhythm of tires plowing through the black goo that plugs highway cracks. (I wanted to write an entire column about this, but my wife thought readers might get tarred of it.)

We journeyed this year to Maine, which is about a 97-hour drive. Okay, maybe not, but it sure seemed like it, what with the kids constantly singing their new “All-Time Greatest Favorite” song, which they just learned from the movie Madagascar. It goes something like this:



“I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT!!”

(Repeat 229 times.)



By the time we got to Maine, I was bloody tarred of that song that song.

This was our 5th Annual “Spend a Week with the Extended Family and DON’T Get on Everyone’s Nerves This Time!” vacation. As you might have quickly deduced, the extended family is my wife’s; there’s no way mine would ever take a vacation with me.

Our Maine destination was a town called Castine, although after our battles with the mosquitoes there, we really think it ought to be called “Ca-sting.” I sure regretted the ultra-short “summer” haircut I got just before the trip; within a couple days, the skeeters had made my noggin a sort of country club, complete with cash bar and a putting green.

Castine is nestled on the edge of a rocky peninsula, and our vacation house looked westward over Mosquito Bay. Wait, sorry, it’s actually Penobscot Bay. During our week there, the Bay became the center of our world. We happily combed its shores finding shells, crabs, and pieces of sea glass, which are now proudly on display in my living room, even though my No. 2 son has astutely pointed out that sea glass is essentially glorified litter.

It should be noted that the water in Penobscot Bay is very wet, and very cold. Our place was in a lightly populated area, so the beaches offered plenty of privacy. One afternoon, I spotted a guy a hundred or so yards up the beach dashing across the sand to take a skinny dip. It didn’t last long. He was barely all the way in before he was all the way out, his passion for a swim much shrunken. Perhaps that’s all I should say about that.

Acadia National Park is about an hour’s drive from Castine (11 hours if you’re traveling with kids singing “I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT!!”). We headed there one day to see grand vistas from the top of the park’s Cadillac Mountain. Unfortunately, the mountaintop was very windblown and fogbound. The only grand vistas we saw were my kids’ grandparents.

The upside was that the wind knocked down the condos the mosquitoes were constructing on my scalp.

Back in Castine, we checked out the Maine Maritime Academy, which No. 5 son (age 4) has already decided is the college for him. Of course, he thinks it’s the “Merry Time” Academy, where you spend time learning how to have fun.

The Academy anchors its own training ship, called the “State of Maine,” on Castine’s waterfront.. We took a free tour of it, learning many fascinating things. For instance, one crewman verified a piece of nautical wisdom I first heard from my dad: The swabbie’s golden rule is, “If it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t move, paint it.”

Our tour guide told us the State of Maine is 499 feet, 10 inches long. There was something maddeningly incomplete about that. It drove me to distraction. So I molded a 2-inch spar of chewed bubblegum to the front of the boat. Voila! She’s a 500-footer!

I almost got caught by a couple of suspicious crewman, but I hightailed it back to the tour and lost myself in the crowd, (proving that, when I really need to, I can still move it move it.)

As we left the boat, I was pleased to see the bubblegum was still there. And a sailor was painting it..

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(Send me a message, in a bottle if you have to. . .preferably a cobalt blue one, because they make the coolest sea glass when they break). TakefiveT5@yahoo.com