The blue dot marks where we are tonight, south of Jay, west of Wiscasset, with 515 miles (834 km) in the bank.  We’ve started for home.  We’ve a long way to go.

Last night, our hosts Ellen and Steve, both doctors, prepared for Jeffrey a fish caught by their son, pasta with pesto made from their garden, lettuce that grew on its own from last year’s seed, and other good things.  This morning they fed him eggs, cheese, and Maine-style pancakes drenched with their homemade maple syrup and peach jam.  Ellen did Jeffrey’s laundry (being a kangaroo puppet, I had none myself) and both our hosts spent a lot of time considering routes for the next leg of our journey.  All this a day after Ellen and Steve returned from a 100-mile self-contained canoe trip!  Real Mainers after 33 years here, they don’t think that is impressive.  But we do!   Ellen told how her refugee father reached America from Poland via France and Mexico, settling in North Creek, NY, where she grew up.  Before we left this morning, she donated to Human Rights First.

With warnings about White Mountains terrain and and its spotty cell phone coverage, Steve, Ellen, and Jeffrey’s own Nancy, convinced us to ride south today instead of west into New Hampshire.  We had to climb steep hills, but fewer than yesterday.  The weather was cold and wet which gives our pedaling more power than in the heat.  The pavement wasn’t bad overall.

The rain kept our camera under cover most of the day.  A few photos:

A building named Bank Building, in Livermore Falls.

During a downpour, we took shelter at a closed farmstand.

Sometimes the shoulder was better than the driving lane.  Note the rumble strip between us and the cars.

While we took a break, two-year-old Jack admired our trike.  We want to send his mom – a biology student at the University of Maine – this photo and others, but by the time we got to a WiFi zone, her email address evaporated.

While today’s rain reduced the number of people we talked to, the quality of discourse was high.  Meet Lynn, co-owner of the Sleepy Time Motel.

Fourteen years ago, she and spouse Mark, on vacation from their former home in Arizona, decided to embark on a new adventure and bought and renovated the motel.  Lynn is an experienced business manager.  She knows what it is to see good workers – and motel guests! – be rounded up in raids and disappear into the maw of the U.S. deportation machine.  She told stories of cruelties she has seen visited upon people whose “crime” is accepting jobs that American citizens refuse.  She thinks it’s wrong to let asylum applicants, people arrested in workplace raids – anyone – go to immigration court without a lawyer.   That makes her a friend of Human Rights First.