I left Jackson in the dark this morning at 5h33 and I arrived in the dusk this evening at the motel in Calais at 18h30. The long summer days, alas, are gone for this year!
Relative to my last trip to Cape Breton, it was a much better one. I ran into moderate rain on the New Jersey Turnpike, which ended before I reached the Garden State Parkway, but I encountered no slowdowns until the approach to the Tappan Zee Bridge and there traffic mostly kept moving, albeit slowly; I got stopped on the Saw Mill River Parkway once more for construction. Much later in the day, I also ran into construction stops on the Airline (Route 9) in Maine. Other than that, traffic moved along smartly and there wasn’t all that much of it. The skies were occluded in New Jersey and New York and cleared at the Connecticut border; after breakfast in Newtown (Connecticut) they clouded up to Hartford, opened again in western Connecticut, clouded up at the Massachusetts border, opened once more east of Tewkesbury (Massachusetts), clouded up again at the Maine border, and opened up for good south of Portland for the rest of the trip, except for a brief spell around Augusta. When the skies were open, there were next to no clouds anywhere and when they were clouded there was no blue sky anywhere—there seemed to be no middle ground.
The fall colours on the trees were impossible to miss once the sun was up, though it’s still very early days yet. In eastern Maine, where they are furthest along, perhaps as much as a quarter of the deciduous trees had turned to some degree; it was much less than that in Connecticut and Massachusetts, but branches or tops of trees and some few whole trees were to be seen all along the highways there. A few brilliant reds were on offer, mostly in Maine, especially beautiful when the sun was out.
I had dinner in Baileyville, just outside Calais, and will be very soon off to bed. Tomorrow, Cape Breton!