Development fever, the expansion of leisure time, and the buildup of our transportation infrastructure has turned formerly peaceful New England vacation spots into hectic places that are only relaxing if you like to sit in a traffic jam on your way to the 7-11. Cape Cod has more traffic than Cambridge during the summer. The islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are heavily built up. The lake district of New Hampshire, about 2 hours north of Boston, is similarly clogged. I spent Sunday and Monday seeing what Maine was like. The goal: see if there were some nice places to relax for a week or two, within a 5-mile drive from a public airport.
The coastline between Boston and Bar Harbor is extremely crowded with nearly every scrap of land containing a house. The area around Bar Harbor is very impressive from the air due to a series of brand-new oceanfront mansions that are the size of small hotels. Even if you had infinite money, which you’d need, these aren’t that desirable for a pilot because they are rather a long drive, esp. considering summer traffic, from any airport.
Beyond Bar Harbor the development thins out but sadly so do the airports. Diamond Star N505WT touched down for the night at Eastport, Maine (KEPM), which is the last town on the coast before you reach New Brunswick, Canada. Eastport is very scenic but not totally relaxing due to (a) houses packed fairly close together due to the fact that Eastport is basically a little island, (b) the place wants to be a working fishing town but mostly the fish have all been killed and therefore the town has a dispirited unemployed atmosphere.
On the way back toward Boston I headed inland. Eastern Maine is logging, logging, logging, paper mills, and more logging. Mostly, though, it is desolate. You can fly for 15 minutes without seeing any vehicles, houses, or people–just trees, lakes, and deserted logging roads. Northwestern Maine seemed to have some more recreational potential. Boat docks and private airstrips began to appear around lakeshores. I landed at Greenville (3b1, big enough to bring a light jet in), a stone’s throw from Moosehead Lake, the largest lake in New England.
A 5-minute ride on the folding Giant Halfway bike brought me into downtown Greenville, the only real town for miles in any direction. This turned out to be a very pleasant spot with several good restaurants and cafes. I sat down in http://www.theblackfrog.com and learned the following about the place:
- “it is like Lake Winnipesaukee was 30 years ago”
- the people who live here year-round are sort of like Alaskans, i.e., folks who didn’t like the crowding and regulation of life in the “mainland”
- there is infinite mountain biking available on the dirt logging roads and snowmobile trails
- you can drive to Boston in 4.5 hours
- you can moor a boat anywhere in the lake and stay overnight; it costs about $400 per season to keep a very large boat in a marina here
- you can rent land from the city-owned airport and build a hangar no problem
- the lake water temperature is in the low 70s at the height of summer
- the season is shorter by a couple of weeks than in New Hampshire
- there is a very outdated ski resort nearby
- the town hosts the world’s largest seaplane fly-in the 2nd weekend of September
Houses are fairly cheap ($100k to live, $200-250k to live fairly large, e.g., on the waterfront with a little boat dock).
In a slow airplane it is a 1.5-hour flight from Moosehead/Greenville to Boston or Montreal and less than 1 hour to Quebec City.
Is this where we should be renting and/or buying houses or setting up a houseboat? Anyone spent some time up in Moosehead or have a better idea for a cool summer escape?
I live in a small town in Ontario where my suggestion for a motto was: Nice place to live, but you would not want to visit.
They turned it down.
Drive east for 40 minutes and you’re at a decent ski resort (Blue Mountain). Drive west for 25 minutes and you’re at one of the worlds best (and least known) freshwater beaches (Sauble Beach). Drive north and you can hike along the Niagara Escarpment to Tobermory.
Do these folks a favour Philip, and keep their secret safe.
Moosehead is very nice, especially once you get up past Rockville on the eastern shore. Most of the western shore is preserved, meaning you have a view of a lake without a bunch of houses on the other side. And you can get a seaplane out to some real wilderness very quickly.
But there is no way it is 4 1/2 hours from Boston by car. 10+ is more like it. In the same amount of time you can drive to the Laurentians north of Montreal, get the benefit of the exchange rate, and be almost in the middle of nowhere and a short seaplane ride from real wilderness but with good French food and a somewhat different culture.
I’ve enjoyed vacations in both, but I’ve gone back repeatedly to the Laurentians. But I agree with Ralph, let’s keep these places a secret.
Sam: Bill Gates says that it is 4 hours, 38 minutes from Harvard Square to Greenville, Maine [Microsoft Map].
According to Mr. Bill it is 6 hours, 46 minutes to Mont-Tremblant, which I believe to be the heart of the Laurentians (just NW of Montreal). With Maine you don’t have to clear customs or immigration, which could become more of a hassle as the U.S. comes under additional terrorist attacks.
Canada is also a bit airplane-unfriendly. Somehow they don’t like to pave over their pristine wilderness into jet-capable runways. The Laurentians have a grass runway, a short sand runway, and a paved airport with no fuel that seems off the real scenic track. They don’t have any lakes nearly as large as Moosehead if one were wanting to boat around.
You forgot to mention the black flies, the mosquitos and the no-see-ums! And there’s no high-speed internet. No one from Massachusetts should even think about it.
Seriously, it’s a great spot, and amazingly unspoiled. I’ve been vacationing there my entire life–my grandfather built a camp in 1950. Four and a half to five hours makes it a bit too far for most folks to go for a weekend and that seems to keep the tourism pressure to a reasonable level.
If you know someone who wants to buy a classic 1946 Chris-Craft 22′ Sportsman that’s been on the lake since 1951, have them email me.
Jim
There’s an airport on the mainland 35 minutes from Bar Harbour (which, as you know, is on an island). The airport is big enough to land a learjet, but I don’t know what kind of plane you fly… 🙂
I’ve known people who like Bar Harbour/Mt. Dessert Island for just this reason…
Tucker: I’ve landed at BHB and it is a fine airport but 35 minutes is too far to drive for me. My apartment in Harvard Square is closer to an airport than that! Not to mention the fact that Mt. Desert is fairly crowded in the summer and real estate prices are high.
Ralph: You’re not supposed to tell anyone about Sauble Beach! That’s a Torontoian secret!
-Fellow TO’er
Moosehead Lake strikes me as a bit too developed. Greenville is an interesting town in that it is not at all like the other rural towns in that part of Maine – much less of the paper mill/lumber town atmosphere. However, if I were to pick a place to go for the summer, I’d probably go to one of the towns near Baxter State Park – Patton or Millinocket (a paper town, so not the best place to live, but convenient to the south end of the park). Baxter is a true jewel. No where like it that I’ve been including the big parks out west; they do an excellent job of limiting the number of people who have access to the park. It can get crowded around Mt Katahdin, but it gets really empty away from there.
But, in the east, of all the places I’ve been, Newfoundland is the true jewel. A coast line beyond compare and desolate – more moose than people! Of course, it takes some effort to get there, but if you’re looking for a place where you can go and spend near the whole summer well removed from the mess that we’ve made of most of the US, you can hardly find a place better.
Thanks, Glenn. Baxter per se doesn’t appeal to me because you’re not allowed to bring dogs into the park. Newfoundland looks good in theory but my airplane-less friends would never be able to make it up there. And I wonder how many times one could cross that cold water and rocky coast in a single-engine piston airplane before one’s number came up…
Another New England resort area with a decent airport is the northern White Mountains of New Hampshire. It’s about three hours from Boston by car. The airport is KHIE. Franconia, Twin Mountain and Jefferson all boast spectacular mountain scenery and lots of outdoor activities. Littleton is the commercial center. The only large lake in the area is Moore reservior, an impoundment on the Connecticut River which offers boating and fishing.
Jim
I love how the super-rich can complain that “Martha’s Vinyard is too crowded” while most of the working class is either: unemployed, living at subsistance, or soon to be unemployed.
Poor Philip.
Bill Gates needs to slow down! He’s doing the drive from Cambridge to Greenville at 55 miles an hour, even with Mass. and NH traffic and Maine backroads!
OK, I drive/meander with three young kids (motto: we stop just for the hell of it)and am partial to scenic routes, so I probably need to speed up while Bill slows down. As always, for most of your drivers the answer will lie between our two times.
Someone complained about Moosehead being too developed, and IMHO the Greenville area is getting there and if you’re traveling by car, you can find any number of equally quaint New England towns closer by, but Moosehead is very large and very diverse and if you just take the dirt road north of Rockwood a few miles you get pretty far away from things. Then a trip into the big town of Greenville becomes an adventure. For kids, the camps along the lake have a wonderful variety of things to do, and the view from little Mt. Kineo is spectacular. If you’re partial to true wilderness, though, you need to get a seaplane to drop you by one of the nearby lakes or at one of the outlying camps; Moosehead itself is not true wilderness.
But before you write off the Laurentians, head on up some time! (We’ll be in Tremblant in August).
Unemployed: Those who are truly super-rich don’t complain that Martha’s Vineyard is too crowded because they have 10-acre estates there with 1000 feet of private beach (you too can buy such a place if you have a spare $7 million). And their servants bring them food from the market so they don’t sit in traffic jams. It is the mildly rich who are clogging the place and annoying each other.
[And it is of course a shame that the working class are suffering right now. I do my best to help, e.g., suggesting that the government encourage the development of ubiquitous free (for a few packets) wireless Internet to revitalize the economy. But if you go back through this blog you’ll see that the idea got a very bad reception. One thing that I learned during my 23 years working as a computer programmer is not to try to sell organizations solutions if they don’t want them. So I’ll probably have to wait 5 or 10 years before my skills would be considered relevant to any of society’s problems. Meanwhile, of course, I’m supporting airplane mechanics and fuel truck drivers…]
Moosehead Lake is a gorgeous place to spend a weekend or if you’re into the rural life as much as I am a week to a lifetime. It’s sort of the hub of everything out that way. Gorgeous. Ripogenous Dam (spelling error perhaps?) is just up the road about twenty minutes (In Maine we call that a short drive.) great fossil hunting there plus beautiful scenery and a really freaking huge dam. Plenty of hiking and mountain biking as well as whitewater rafting. If you’re going rafting I’d sugguest Unicorn Rafting Expeditions ( http://www.unicornraft.com ) for a real rough and tumble time.
Fooey.. I didn’t want to read or respond, but this sounded fun:
“Those who are truly super-rich …have 10-acre estates … And their servants.. ”
Wealth is like ice cream; it comes in different flavors. 🙂
“It is the mildly rich who are clogging the place and annoying each other.”
ie: the middle class.
Nobody likes the middle class anymore… *sigh*
Mooshead is best visited in the winter because it is a “vaction spot” in the summer. That can be said for most of New England. Go South for the summer, like Arizona. Immerse in the lifestyle, to the extreme. Don’t fight the heat – soak it in and surround yourself with people who live with it… so darn friendly off-season! Sure beats the tourism face. Now that is what I call “cool”.
Uh, the middle class of Mass. family of 4, makes about $80k a year. That’s median family income. No way could they handle Martha’s unless it was for just a weekend visit. Philip is mildly rich. He should know what it takes for Martha’s little island. Although if he keeps buying planes and vacation homes, he ain’t gonna be rich much longer. (grin).