Maine by Midnight
On Saturday, June 19th, traveling the thruway north towards Albany wasn’t too bad for driving, but going east towards Boston on The Massachusetts Turnpike grated on my nerves continuously! The traffic was dense and the road was not smooth. I thought any route other than I-95 north for Maine would be better, but was I ever mistaken! I-93 in New Hampshire was a little bit of an improvement for going north. I would have thought the secondary road, Route 3, would have been even better yet. I had no clue what I was in for by being curious to see Lake Winnipesaukee!
Before arriving into Laconia, the real torture began when getting out of the car in the town of Winnisquam, NH to take some photos of Lake Winnisquam (the southern Sqam Lake). It was hot outdoors and the sun shined strong. That was when it started to become evident that some event had to be going on to attract so many motorcycles.
(All shots are enlarged by clicking on them.)
(Facing north on Route 3′s bridge over Winnisquam ↑ )
(Facing south on the same motorcycle infested bridge ↑ )
I asked a guy walking along Old Route 3 (Paquette Drive) if there was some special event going on. He told me it was “Bike Week” and everyone was having fun. I got back into my car to find a nearby road with less motorcycle traffic to take more pictures of what I mistakenly thought was Lake Winnipesaukee. I found a clearing upon a railroad bed along Dutile Shore Road north off of Route 3 (Laconia Road). Up the bank I went, facing west, to get shots like these:
Unbeknown to me, while I reached into my camera bag to get out the lens shade cover to protect the camera from the bright sun, my (when new, $60) spare camera battery and lens cap cover fell out when the bag flipped upside down.
It didn’t take too long to find the lens cap cover, but the extra battery cost me in more ways than one. Being that I was in sensory-overload, I was oblivious to what torture I was about to put myself through. While wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals, I felt the poison ivy covered ground with my bare hands to search for the camera battery (the growth was too thick for seeing such a small black object). After about 15-20 minutes of being in the hot sun, I had to give up the search and hope that maybe I forgot the battery at home (which I did not). The first chance I got to try and wash off the poison ivy oil was when finding a Dunkin Donuts store. I had a bar of soap, but it’s nothing like Technu, which I didn’t get until a few days later.¹
After that incident, the only thing on my mind was to escape the motorcycles. I didn’t know they were centered in Laconia, which was right where I was headed.
If only I had known that it was the 87th Anniversary of Laconia Motorcycle Week and I was headed straight into the middle of it! Read all about it at Laconia Motorcycle Week or see a 39 second sample video of what it was like.
I managed to snap one shot of the reality of mucking my way into the thick of that hellish noise, while sitting behind the wheel stuck at a red light. ↓
I thought I would be going away from them on Route 106 north. I don’t remember how I made my way back onto I-93 north, but eventually I did find my way back there. Once back on Route 3, I headed east towards Maine. The motorcycles were still everywhere! It seemed as if all of New Hampshire was filled with them! There were hundreds of thousands of bikers. My ears hurt for the next two days from their noise. Route 2 was the closest road for me then to get out of New Hampshire and into Maine. It wasn’t until near midnight before crossing the state line out of the motorcycle infested noise, but then the road became very rough from being under construction that driving had to be restricted below 20 miles per hour.
Sometime between 1 and 2 a.m. (after having driven for about 16 hours already), I made it to Route 150 just past Skowhegan. My 2001 Jimapco map of the Northeast USA, that I was relying on, didn’t tell me Route 150 comes to a dead end at Sebac Lake! There was no “Dead End” sign until the very end of the road! It said, “Road Ends” and that it did… abruptly! I turned around and went back to Willimantic and headed north on Mountain Road. It was now around 2 or 3 a.m. On the right, was a logging road. Onto it I slowly drove, deeper into the quiet woods.
¹After being back home, I read somewhere online that washing with warm water and soap can actually spread a poison ivy infection.
