Maine Event: Day 13
Still thinking about our train trip yesterday. It was $3 one way per person to go about 20 miles via Amtrak; if you were to take Caltrain to Burlingame from SF (roughly the same distance) it would be $5.75 - $6.00 per person one way (cheaper price with Clipper). So, double the price. I recognize that Amtrak is federal and CalTrain is regional but still...if we want to move people away from cars and onto more sustainable transportation then we need to tilt the resources the other way. When I was in school these cute little electric autonomous buses were all the rage for cities. When we arrived in Portland via Amtrak we walked out completely bewildered (the train station and area around it is not designed for people but for cars with acres of parking for not only Amtrak/buses but also businesses in the area. We stumbled towards a taxi with our luggage and just beyond the taxi was a gleaming bus that I had read about but had no idea where we would catch it. The driver was super kind and that is something in the autonomous world I'd like to keep. They don't have to drive but having a friendly helpful human on board is great. How we move people and things has got to change and it is taking up a lot of my thinking. Mostly the Portland buses don't magically show up when you need them and they take about the same amount of time as it takes us to walk to most locations. Some other time I'll write about the difference in the cost of living but the train should not be double.
Today was a pretty quiet day, we shopped for food that doesn't come from the farmers market at the Portland Food Co-op. It's on the other side of downtown so we get to walk through the even older section which is pretty glorious.
June 20, 2018, Matthew and I went on a wonderful walk in Point Reyes National Seashore through a forest and across hillsides then through pastures along Drake's Lagoon to find this historical marker far out on the outer cliff overlooking the end of the earth. It was a great treasure.
Our evening walk here in Portland is still evolving but the path is starting to reveal itself and it winds around an old cemetery and ends up on the Western Promenade where we discovered this beauty, which reminded me of the prior discovery. Connecting two places.
Which is on top of this:
Here is an image of downtown, just about any shop looks better in these windows.
Here are some houses/apartment buildings near the Western Promenade and on our proto-evening walk. Yes, these are gorgeous and almost all the buildings look like these.
I've attached the tax documents for this one (I'm pretty sure) from 1924 it was built in 1899 so it is pretty modern in comparison to many of the buildings in the neighborhood. The view of the Western Prom is of the Fore River and South Portland, the Airport, and what my friend Rosemary calls "the tank farm" which are industrial tanks for storing oil for Canada and also for making asphalt. You can read more about the battle to try to get the industry to clean up it's act here. The East Coast is far more industrialized in an integrated way. It's not hidden away on the edge of poor neighborhoods where you can't really walk and see what is going on.
Trees: We now can tell the difference between the Northern red oak, White oak and the Swamp white oak. Just barely, but I think we got them. We also saw a Broad-Winged Hawk - a kind we don't have on the west coast. Very cool to be learning so many new things.
7-day rate of Covid-19 in Cumberland County:
- 238 Cases
- 2.99% Positivity
- Deaths <10
- 83.2% Eligible Population Fully Vaccinated
- 20 New Hospital Admissions
7-day rate of Covid-19 in San Francisco County:
- 1,024 Cases
- 3.1% Positivity
- Deaths <10
- 78.4% Eligible Population Fully Vaccinated
- 72 New Hospital Admissions
There is so much going on in the news/mass media that I'm just not going to touch here. Also during the week there will be less text I imagine - just a pretty picture.
Sending love, Tawnia