Field Day Photography

Hi everyone! Cara here. It's been a crazy couple of weeks of getting Caia into summer camp, finally getting my Quintana Roo driving license, meeting new friends (see The Sunday Bottles), a new alliance with a wedding vendor here in Playa del Carmen (more about that later) and my newest aquisiton of an iphone and all of its cool photo apps! So it's definitely time for the second part of my travel journal, which I'd mistakenly said was going to be about St. John, New Brunswick, but will actually be about our first port of call, Portland, Maine. I promise that the next post will be about St. John, where I took a four-hour photography expedition through the Bay of Fundy.

Last we left off, I'd covered Boston and the terrible odyssey that was getting aboard our Carnival Cruise. I suppose the roughly 3000 passengers were sufficiently peeved enough to warrant us getting a formal letter of apology a few days ago from President and CEO of Carnival Cruises, Gerry Cahill, and a one day's refund credit...good on them. Because of that I might actually consider maybe giving them another shot one day. And, you know, if wasn't all that bad. For example:

There's nothing like seeing the look on your daughter's face when she realizes she's on a really, really big boat. We may have been cold, but it was a good excuse for lots of hugs.

The day after boarding was spent sleeping in while we were at sea, reconnecting with Grandma and Grandpa, drinking wine, and getting super excited for the following day's shore excursion in Maine, which we'd splurged on because it sounded so cool--an eight-hour steam train ride through the White Mountain National Forest to the summit of Mount Washington. In our minds, it was likely to rival the experience of the Harry Potter Steam Train journey we'd done in Scotland in 2007. We would be bringing Caia, too, because she's never been on a train, and I honestly don't think she's ever been on a mountain; Playa del Carmen has beautiful waters, white sand, Mayan ruins and a thriving jungle, but it is also one of the flattest places on earth.

So we woke up the following day in Portand, Maine at six in the morning. We got showered and dressed and packed and fed, got our hands on a stroller through the kids' club at Camp Carnival, buttoned up our jackets and saw our breath while we walked down the gangway telling Caia about trains and mountains and forests. You may imagine the look on this happy family's face when we were told we'd missed the excursion due to rescheduling because of the ship's tardiness in leaving Boston. We had, apparently, also missed the memo lost in the flood of papers delivered to our room every day, which inevitably became colouring books for Caia. You may also imagine the wrath that descended on the poor soul who delivered us this news.

And so this is how we ended up touring Kennebunkport, a place I'd never heard of, but was the only tour available since all of the lighthouse tours--for which Maine is famous--were already sold out. Kennebunkport is known not only for it's odd-sounding name, but for being the site of former President Bush's summer estate, and I think Martha Stewart lives somewhere in the vicinity--in fact, I later found out that Kennebunkport is home to several professional Martha Stewart impersonators. The tour was fine, and it was quite pretty, but I was camera-challenged throughout the scenic bus tour due to a napping child in my arms, and so Craig took over on the point-and-shoot as we passed some lovely scenery and made the surprising discovery that surfing is actually a popular pastime in Maine.