Soggy in Bangor

We limped into Bangor, Maine on Wednesday night after walking ourselves into the ground in Montreal over Labour Day weekend with an overnight stop in Quebec City on the way in for good measure.

It is “raining strings” in Bangor tonight as they say in French (il pleut des cordes); in Japanese this would definitely qualify as “zaa zaa” rain (ame ga zaa zaa furimasu) which I’d translate with great poetic license as “the rain sings like the strings of a zither,” but which really can’t be translated into literal  English at all. Suffice to say it is raining pretty hard.

And we won’t be escaping the rain this time, because we’re smack dab in the path of Tropical Storm Hannah.

2008 is setting records for hurricanes and tropical storms. Hurricane Ike is currently at category 4 and is just hours away from hitting the Turks and Caicos and Great Inagua Island. Hannah has been downgraded to a tropical storm; it made landfall near the South Carolina-North Carolina border at 3:15 a.m EST with wind gusts measured up to 77 mph.

This would, of course, be the year that we travel the east coast. We have the luxury of being pre-packed to seek higher ground at a moment’s notice since everything we have with us already fits in the car, but we have a lot of friends along the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico, and we hope that everyone is staying safe as the US gets pummeled by severe weather this year.

I am afraid that we have done Bangor a disservice by arriving via Brattleboro, Montreal and Quebec during awful weather: the comparison doesn’t serve Bangor well.  (It’s like the first time I visited South Korea, by way of Japan: not the good way to make a first impression.  Fortunately I went back and fell in love with South Korea on subsequent trips.) Bangor’s charms have remained hidden to us as I’ve been itchy, allergic, and very sleepy the short time we’ve been here.  I credit bad luck and bad timing and don’t fault Bangor at all: if anyone can kindly point out what to do, see or eat around Bangor we’ll see if we can’t try again on our way back down south.

Tomorrow, we check out of the Bangor Motel 6 and head north to check out a promising little sublet close to the Canadian border, where we hope to hole up through the rain for the rest of the month, do our own cooking (hooray!), and make weekend forays into New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and maybe even PEI (provinces which I toured in a fabulous post-McGill road trip with my travel buddy Trish but which Neil has never visited). We also hope to get caught up on some writing, paperwork, non-work programming, and other sorts of things that are easier to achieve when we’re staying still for a while than when we’re checking in and out of hotels.

If you have suggestions for Bangor, for Down East Maine, or for the Maritime Provinces, please let us know! We’ll have a little more time to plan and play tourist, and I am really excited to finally get to show Neil the Maritimes, too.

And keep your fingers crossed for a break in the weather.  September is shaping up to be a hell of a soggy month.

Weather Map Credits

• New England Current Fronts map courtesy of Weather Underground
• Tropical Storm Hannah Projected Path map courtesy of The Weather Channel