Lake Champlain & Moriah redux.

Last summer, I posted about riding Amtrak's Adirondack from New York City to Plattsburgh, New York (the train continues north to Montreal) on the way to visit my in-laws in Massena. In that post, I included a couple of photos and some text about a preserved locomotive, ore jenny and caboose from the Lake Champlain & Moriah Railroad that are on display adjacent to the Port Henry, New York station. At the time, it was raining, and the quality of the photos (which I had to shoot through a window because the stop at Fort Henry was too brief to allow me to detrain) suffered accordingly. When I took the Adirondack north again a couple of weeks ago, the weather was better, so I got these shots, which are correspondingly more satisfactory:

Portland Head Light

Last weekend we took Liz to Maine to start three weeks of camp at Kingsley Pines (I'm giving them free advertisng because I think it's an excellent camp run by great people), and stayed with Lori, my wife's step-cousin once removed, in Cape Elizabeth, near Portland. Our first evening there, we had dinner al fresco in the park surrounding Portland Head Light. The park commands sweeping views of Portland Inlet and the southern reach of Casco Bay, with its many islands.

Soon after we arrived, I looked westward and saw two large sailing vessels, a two-masted schooner and a sloop, between the breakwaters at the entrance to Portland Harbor.


A short while later, a cargo ship came out of the harbor, heading for sea.


The ship proved to be Jutta, a typical small tramp freighter, capable of carrying containers or dry bulk cargo.


Lori told me Portland Head is the most photographed lighthouse in the U.S., but that didn't deter me from snapping it once again.


As I went back up the hill, the sun was obscured by a cloud, softly backlighting the flag.