Holiday to New England in Oct 2023: Day 3 – Portland to Rockland

By Nige on Fri 13 Oct 2023 at 12:59
Type: Post
Story: Holiday to New England in Oct 2023
Tags: Bar Harbor | Hertz | Hilton | Holidays | Maine | New England | Portland | USA

What a beautiful morning in Portland. Clear skies and a tad chilly; quiet around town and Starbucks waiting for us. Not much more we can ask for.

The morning started very early for me – I was up at around 2am. Vick did really well to stay in bed until after 4am.

As normal, we had located our earliest opening and nearest Starbucks and headed out that way at around 5am. It was a lovely, cold morning, so we had our jumpers and fleeces on. Naturally, I had my shorts on too!

We sat in the quite quaint Starbucks store not far off a mile away from the hotel, and talked about the day ahead.

We had climbed up a little way, so when we walked out of the store we could see the sun rising over the cruise liner that was docked close to our hotel. It was a fab sight!

We were told that breakfast was served from 7am, although it may have been open earlier than that!

We had a further $10 per person available, but everything was charged individually. There wasn’t even a continental buffet offering.

What we did order was very tasty and well worth the small additional cost that we ended up paying.

The lady serving us had the start of a nasty shake as if she was an early onset sufferer of a central nervous system disease. She was lovely and seemed to be dealing with it with a big smile on her face – good for her.

We hit the road around 8am and our first target might be the most important of the day: it’s the last Starbucks that we will see for a number of days, so critical we get there!

So Brunswick was entered into the Audi sat nav.

The Brunswick Starbucks was fine – it was only about 30 mins away, so we decided to drink as we drove (not normally something you can get away with, but on this occasion we were confident we would be ok).

Next target was Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse.

From the display on my mobile phone (acting as a dashcam), we were getting some great scenes of us driving along roads aligned with mature trees.

We hadn’t seen anything too dramatic as yet, but it was all looking great.

We arrived at Rockland and it didn’t appear to be very busy. It was a tad chilly, but the sun was out. This wasn’t your standard lighthouse, but one that required a walk along a breakwater for almost a mile before reaching it.

As we walked further along the exposed breakwater, it got colder and colder. The wind was building and the waves were just sweeping over the edge of the breakwater. It was great though.

Our visit to the lighthouse was excellent and turned out to be something we just did not expect.

On the basis that we had committed NOT to having lunch today, I decided I had to dig out the Haribo for the next section of our journey.

Follow the whole story here: Holiday to New England in Oct 2023