Today was our last full day in Castine and we had booked a day's kayaking with Karen who runs Castine Kayak Adventures. The weather was dull as we turned up at the wharf with plenty of warm layers to meet Karen. She was very reassuring and quizzed us about our health and experience so we were immediately confident we were in safe and experienced hands. We even practiced getting in and out of the kayak on dry land before getting onto the water at all. Well not qui...

Today we woke to grey overcast skies so the incentive to get out to walk wasn't strong. Instead we spent the day reading, researching where to go on sunny days and photographing the wildlife visitors to the bird table and bird feeder in our Castine garden. Oh and Dave went for a run as the weather brightened up later in the day. We'd seen several interesting birds at the bird feeder since we've been here so when a Blue Jay arrived this morning Jill decided to ge...

The only unlucky thing about this Friday the 13th was that it was raining quite hard from the start. Clearly not a day for climbing the modest coastal mountains so we decided to head off to the nearby town of Bucksport, which is much more of a working town than Castine, to pick up a few bits of shopping and try to organise hair cuts - we've been away close to eight weeks so both felt the need for a trim. The cleaners, who we met yesterday, had advised appointment...

We had to get our skates on to return the hire car to (H)etrz at Bangor International Airport, about an hour's drive away. This meant that Jill had to brave the dual challenge of driving an automatic car on the wrong, that's the right, side of the road for the first time whilst we've been away. She'd taken the house swap car out for a little test drive yesterday just to get the feel of it: fortunately the swap car is a C-class Mercedes so very like our car and th...

Our last night in Canada was spent in a heavily over chintzed room at the Owen House Inn, can't say we were sorry to leave that but we were sorry to leave Canada. We had an amazing seven weeks, we did so many wonderful things, saw so many fantastic sights and met so many friendly, generous Canadians. But we couldn't be sad for long as we start the next part of our North American adventure. And we were definitely excited to be crossing into USA. It's probably tr...