The Thanksgiving just past marked a first in my life: the first Thanksgiving spent without another member of my immediate family. I opted to spend the time with Sarah and her family in Maine. While not a serious producer of angst, I was interested to see how this would go. And, when all was said and done, you know what the biggest difference was between this Thanksgiving and last?

The stuffing.

Sarah's mom makes stuffing the English way, meaning it's much more wet than what we usually cram into the bird. It also uses sausage meat, which makes the stuffing a meal in itself. Not that I was complaining, as I helped myself to good sized portions of it. The one drawback, though, is that the stuffing seems to, how shall I say, speed and intensify certain bodily processes. It didn't reach Blazing Saddles proportions, but, well, let's just leave it at that.

Our continued run of warm weather (don't get me started again) made its way up the coast, meaning that I was going around mid-coast Maine in late November without a coat on. Usually there's snow on the ground by now.

In any event, the nice weather facilitated a day trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park (though, as I think of it, it was probably the coldest day of the trip). We hit Acadia first. Acadia is best known for Cadillac Mountain, the highest peak on the Atlantic coast and the spot in the continental US that first sees daylight (can anyone guess what part of the US gets daylight before this? Email me if you think you know!). It's not that high (1500 feet, much shorter than I thought), and you can drive up it, so we did that.

Great views going up, but the summit was socked in. There's what appears to be sea grass on the summit, too, which is very hard to get one's head around. We did get a good picture of a tern sitting on the roof of a car. The owners of the car, clearly not sure what to do, decided to feed it God knows what from their car. Idiots.

We drove around, looking at some of the other things up there, but made a horrific discovery. All of the bathrooms were closed. This caused us to cut our visit short (never did find the Sieur de Mont spring) and head for Bar Harbor, with its well marked and signed public restroom facility.

Bar Harbor's downtown is full of the snooty tourist shops that one would find in any of the New England coastal towns where families in Volvos get "back to nature" at a rented house. Many of the shops have cutesy names, though the only one that comes to mind is Carmen Verandah's, a restaurant with outdoor dining (aside: their menu included sushi grade yellowtail that they then cooked. The whole idea of sushi grade fish is to EAT IT AS SUSHI.).

So it was a lot of high end knick-knacks and stuff, with about half the shops closed for the season. If you're looking for scrimshaw, T-shirts with Maine-related slogans, or overpriced confections, you're all set in Bar Harbor.

My only purchase was an $.85 glass of blueberry soda, served at the Rexall Drug lunch counter. Kind of funny that something like that would be a highlight, but consider how few drug stores still have a lunch counter or a soda fountain. I can get overpriced carvings at any number of places.

The other cultural highlight was our trip to Bangor on Saturday that included stops at the Wal-Mart, the Bangor Mall, and a Chinese buffet place which was quite good. Not much to add there, except that the Bangor Mall had the water massage tables that Jon Couture was going on about in his blog. Smaller lines, but none of us partook.

Wrapped up the trip with a visit to my sister, who seemed to like only having to deal with her family (and our aunt) on Thanksgiving. We got to meet their "new" dog (new to them, but it's about 12 years old), which only firms my resolve to get a dog. Perhaps not something that big and hairy (it's a golden lab), but a dog nevertheless.