Enjoying Fun and Games of Vacation

In the morning we drove into Acadia National Park in Maine and to the top of Mt. Cadillac, a hunk of granite that is only about 3,000 feet high but happens to be the highest point on the Atlantic seaboard.

We parked above a bay that had been gouged out by glaciers 15,000 years ago and has the only sandy beach in the park. The temperature of the water, we were told, is only 50 degrees even on hot summer days. Despite the cold, some of our party climbed down wooden steps to the beach and strolled along it as if it were Santa Monica Bay. I gave it a look and hurried back to the bus and my copy of the Bangor Daily News.

Our tour guide had asked us not to litter the beach, which was pristine, and not to pick leaves. “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints,” she aphorized.

She also told us that the word Cajun , meaning natives of Louisiana, is a corruption of Acadian , and was brought to New Orleans by Acadian French deported by the British in the 18th Century.

We were back in Bar Harbor in time for lunch on our own. My wife and I walked up and down the tidy Main Street looking for a likely seafood restaurant, of which there were plenty. Every storefront was varnished like a bar top.

We found a restaurant that looked promising and my wife ordered broiled lobster. She had ordered boiled lobster the night before and had been slightly disappointed. She had said she was losing her sense of taste, a calamity that I seriously doubted.

“This is really much better,” she said, attacking the lobster like a cat.

“You see,” I said, “you haven’t lost your sense of taste after all.”

The trip was saved.

That evening we had cocktails and dinner at the Bar Harbor Inn, and I retired early to watch yet another miracle on TV. This time the Dodgers won, 7-4, on Kirk Gibson’s three-run homer, with a diving last-out catch by John Shelby--the kind he missed in the first game. Dodgers 3 games, Mets 2.

In the morning most of the men on the bus were talking about the Dodgers. They had finally come to realize that a miracle was in the making. From then on the excitement of it traveled with us.

On the way to Quebec (pronounced Kay-bec) I tried to work the crossword puzzle in the Bangor Daily News, but I couldn’t get an eight-letter word meaning minnow-type fish, a four-letter word meaning double curve, and a four-letter word meaning malarial fever.

Meanwhile, we were driving through gorgeous woods of pine and autumnal leafage of gold, red, brown and yellow. I didn’t know one tree from another, but a poster in the back of the bus pictured red maple, sugar maple, birch, ash, alder, white oak, beech, aspen, cherry, hickory, and sumac. I suspect we saw most of them.

We passed a serene lake surrounded by trees in glorious color. A pretty two-story shingle house sat out on a small promontory. A small boat was beached beside a little pier. It looked idyllic.

“Do you think you could live there?” my wife asked.

“Two weeks,” I said. “At the most.”

We crossed the U.S.-Canadian border without inspection, attesting to the extraordinarily peaceful relations between the nations. We had brought along expired passports (good enough, we were told), but the Canadian immigration officers didn’t even come aboard the bus. All we did was debark to plunder the duty-free shop.

Quebec is one of the prettiest cities I have seen. Its high city is situated on a cliff above the St. Lawrence River, like a fortress, which indeed it has been. Its houses and public buildings with their mansard roofs give it a European look. The old city, within the walls, is antique and quaint. Quebec is French in origin and French in culture; 95% of its citizens speak French, and French is the first language, by law, in its schools. It is also Catholic.

The Plains of Abraham, on which the British defeated the French in 1759, is a peaceful green park.

That night, back in Los Angeles, the Mets tied the series, 3-3.