Down to the last three days

I'm in complete denial about this fact, but I only have three more days (including today) on my bike. I'm sure I'll be posting a long, contemplative end of trip rumination in the next handful of days, so for now I'm going to go ahead and ignore the fact that this almost 5,000 mile journey is coming to an end.

As some of you who have met me along the way might already know, I've been trying to get myself hired as a cook down in Antarctica. I found out about a week ago that I got the job, and now, amazingly enough, I know what I'm going to be doing for the next year+ of my life. Here's the master plan:



I also found my new home, or at least somewhere I plan on living for a while. Starting all the way back in New York, people kept telling me that I needed to check out Bread and Puppet up in Glover, Vermont. Bread and Puppet is an artist/activist community up in Northern Vermont, and I fell instantly and hopelessly in love with it when I arrived. I've spent a good chunk of the last four months mulling over the way our society views art as a commodity rather than a source of community building sustenance, and found that the good folks over at Bread and Puppet have an ideology extremely similar to my own. Here's their cheap art manifesto:

 My friend Karen from White River Junction turned out to know one of the puppeteers, and while he was unfortunately out of town while I was visiting, that did mean that I got to sleep in his magical, gypsy caravan-esque schoolbus. I'll be putting up a boatload of pictures once I get images off my camera, so for now all I have is a crappy iphone picture of their puppet warehouse:



Bread and Puppet's piggies. I made myself useful on the farm while I was there, and spent the day creating garden beds and feeding weeds to the pigs.




This is only one of many taxidermed mooses (is moose already plural? meese? hmmmm) I saw in small town grocery stores while in Vermont.



I felt a bit sad when I crossed into Maine: it was the last new state line that I was going to cross, and it solidified the fact that I'm at the end of this journey. But now is not the time to start waxing preemptively nostalgic, I'll save that for a few days from now. It's amazing how similar Maine feels to the Pacific Northwest, both in terms of geography and weather. I spent two days riding in torrential downpours, and didn't really see the sun until yesterday. That said, the landscape was beautiful, and I wound my way along foggy lakes and inlets thinking about the fact that Maine's beauty feels very wild and untamed. 



I met up with an old rugby friend in Vassalboro, and we took a trip out to Bar Harbor to visit her brother. Once again I neglected to take any pictures with my phone, so I'll post once I have pictures off my camera.