We woke up on Saturday excited that we were going to go whale watching. We packed up and made it almost 50 miles to Gloucester before we found a place to stop for breakfast. The restaurants that we found online had large lines waiting to go in. As we drove around exploring, Tammy spotted a place that looked like a bed and breakfast with banners that said open and buffet. We approached the establishment and still weren’t sure if we were welcome. When we found the correct door, we were warmly welcomed and invited to join the Castle Inn’s Saturday morning buffet. The staff was happy to share the history of the establishment with us. The Castle Inn at 141 Essex Ave in West Gloucester was originally called Spruce Manor. The manor was built in the late 1800s, completed in 1900, taking two years to build. The manor was built for Ruben Brooks and his family, a co-founder of LePage’s Glue. I remember LePage glue. It was the bottle with a rubber tip that the teacher used when I was a student using paste. A gentleman at Castle Inn told us that if we liked that Inn, we should go to Rockport and take a look at The Emerson Inn.
We wandered for a bit and found the Gloucester harbor and Fisherman’s Memorial. The harbor was beautiful, a stark contrast to the 5368 names of fishermen lost to the sea. We happened to be present for the annual memorial butterfly release.
We still had some time left when we got done at Gloucester Fisherman’s Memlorial, so we went up to Rockport to check out Emerson Inn (which took it’s name from one of the favorite guests, Ralph Waldo) and found the scenic Pigeon Cove.
After Pigeon Cove, we traveled to Rose’s Warf and got in line for our whale watching tour. We left promptly at 1:30. Our naturalist, Tina shared some information with us and then busied herself watching for wildlife. We traveled for almost an hour and saw two or three seals poking their heads up, to see what we were doing. After an hour of watching the horizon, I gave up and went downstairs for beers. The bartender told me we’d see whales soon. I no more than got back upstairs and a young man of 10 or 12 years, screamed whale. Everyone looked to see where he was looking and then settled back down with the feeling that his exclamation was just the over exuberance of youth. Once everyone had settled back in, Tina came on the PA to announce that we had whales at about 1 o-clock. We watched Satula, Pinpall and her calf diving and surfacing for about a half hour. The other whale watch company joined us. Tina shared information about the whales the whole time.
The ship’s crew noticed whale activity on the horizon, so we left Satula, Pinball and the calf and found Othello, Valley and her calf slapping their pectorial fins on the surface. Tina indicated that the whales were engaged in some form of communication, but the reason for it is unknown. After some time watching this activity we headed back to Rose’s Warf. We were greeted by a storm on the way in, but it was still a relatively smooth trip. According to google maps we traveled 97 miles in four hours and six minutes.
After whale watching we returned to the car and traveled for 45 minutes till we stopped at a Mobil station in Newberryport. We had made our goal. We had arrived in Maine. We still needed to explore the state and find my cousin near Bangor, but we had arrived in Maine. We started looking for a place to eat and found Litchfield’s Bar and Grill in Wells, Maine. After some more of the east coast’s fine seafood and a beer called Lunch from Maine Beer Company, we made our way to Brunswick and found lodging at the Relax Inn.