Back in the day we used to rent a nice four-bedroom townhouse in Bar Harbor for about two hundred a night. That was going to turn into a thousand a night in "high" season, so we pretty much never visited Bah Habba, as the locals call it, after April.
You cross the river at Calais (pronounced "Calus" by the locals) and all of a sudden you're in the land of eternal sunshine.
Not that the sun shines more in New Brunswick than it does in Maine, but if you have occasion to drive up the east coast make a note of the highway on-ramps and off-ramps in NB when compared to Maine.
In Maine they are just regular on-ramps etc.
In New Brunswick a ramp, on or off the main highway, can go on for miles.
This is the legacy of Richard Hatfield, who was elected time and again as Premier of the Province at a time when everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY knew the man was gay and it was not yet socially acceptable to be "out".
I once asked a cab driver in Saint John about that.
"So what's up with the Preem? Seems he spends more time in New York City than he does here. Why you keep voting for the old fag?"
Here's the answer; "the old fag, as you so rudely put it, takes care of business."
And he did!
Those four-mile-long on-ramps kept a lot of redneck paving contractors and all their red-neck employees busy with regular pay-checks.
Once when a reporter asked him how he could justify spending more time in New York than New Brunswick, he replied "just because I run the place doesn't mean I have to live there."
How can you not love that! A truthful politician!
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