DAY 2 (6/12/05): Boothbay Harbor to Camden, ME. 86.2 mi. The temperature dropped almost 30 degrees from yesterday's high, so when we awoke it was in the high 50's, and the harbor was completely shrouded in thick fog. We were waiting at the door of the Ebb Tide diner when it opened at 6:30 a.m. After a nice breakfast we headed north out of Boothbay on a road that paralleled rt 27 (the main drag of that peninsula). The route all morning (mostly on the East Coast Greenway) was on back country roads with lots of gentle rolling hills. The fog remained really thick until about 11 a.m. We pedalled on up the coast, and had lunch at a beautiful cove. The water was incredibly smooth, and there was a little wooded island just a few hundred yards off shore. After lunch we pedalled on past a farm that raises Belted Galloways (basically the Oreo cookie of the bovine family, cows with the front and rear thirds dark brown and the midsection white). Then, we arrived in Camden at the White Hall Inn, the place where the poetess Edna St. Vincent Milay did her first public reading. It is a very nice inn and a nice place to relax after a hard ride. DAY 3 (6/13/05): Camden to Lewiston, ME. 82 mi. You know when you get up at 6 a.m. for your morning walk and you break a sweat before you reach the end of the driveway that you are in for a scorching day of cycling and such was the case today. We switched today from the East Coast Greenway which we've been following so far, to the Adventure Cycling north tier route which I will follow for several hundred miles now. The beginning of the day was on somewhat busy roads as we backtracked south a little bit to Daramiscotta. There, I bid a fond farewell to the Atlantic ocean, and oceans in general for that matter, for a good while. After turning inland, the route got much less busy and much hillier. One climb in particular, on the aptly named Blinn Hill road, was a real doozy, with three very convincing false summits. The true summit was gorgeous, though, a large expanse of pasture land divided up by many old handmade stone walls. We decended off the top into the happening town of Dresden Mills, where I had two outstanding grilled cheese sandwiches. From there out we followed rt 197 which, relative to the morning, was quite flat. Unfortunately, there was a very strong head wind all the way into Lewiston, so we were totally thrashed when we got here. Headwinds are particularly exhausting on a touring bike, given that the loaded tourer has the same aerodymanic profile as a sheet of plywood. Nonetheless, after a shower and a nice dinner at a Mexican restaurant we were totally revitalized. My parents really have been spoiling me, I will be in for quite a shock when they head back to Boston in two days and I press on to New York. After dinner we drove over to Auburn, where my great grandfather, Samuel Cohen, lived in the '30's and 40's. His house is still there and my father was able to go in and look around. It was nice to end such a hard day of riding with a little Cohen family history--who knows when we will ever be back here?