Wednesday, August 13, 2008

8/13/08 The Dairy Corner

After dinner on the beach, we went on some backroads and came out at the intersection of Route 1 with Route 9 and came to The Dairy Corner. I am getting a headstart on that ice cream quest for next summer. ;-) Grace had black raspberry ice cream. It was a hard-serve ice cream and not a soft-serve ice cream like at Dutch Treat.

But I got a Nor'Easter . . . the Cyclone / Blizzard equivalent.

8/13/08 ...on the boardwalk...

So I'm at Maine's premier beach resort and giant tourist attraction but I'm inside al day and night working. It is pretty fun, though, to sit on Grace's "deck" (enclosed patio?) with glass on two sides, looking out over the Atlantic and gorgeous sandy beach. The hardest part has been that it hasn't been raining. Two straight days of no rain and I'm stuck indoors. Have we even had two straight days of no rain since I got back in the middle of June? The good news is: we've gotten a lot of good work done. We've been working on two different research papers and some data analysis. We finished up our work on the "Tools Retreat" (all day technology workshop) that we're putting on for our department colleagues at the end of the month (this will be our 4th Tools Retreat in a year . . . we have such a great department). We met for 2 days in June and 2 days in July and now 2 and a half days in August. It's so nice to not have to try to do this part of my job by myself. I so prefer to do research as part of a team.


But it's hard to do 12 straight hours of work, so we do take an occasional break. Tonight we went down to the tourist part of Old Orchard Beach and walked around the boardwalk, up and down the pier, and into some of the shops. Here's where we picked up our dinner:

Check out the location of that Chinese restaurant. It's on the midway! See the carnies and the rides? What a hoot!

We went into a candy shop where they make their own taffy. The sign actually says, "Please try a sample of our handmade taffy." I tried the flavor called cake batter. I passed over blueberry and root beer which both sounded interesting.

When you're on the east coast, the sunrises are over the water and the sunsets are not. Here's a sunset shot as the train guards are coming down. The Down Easter train is coming through.

Well, we only thought the Down Easter was coming through. The gates went back up, we crossed the track, then the gates went back down and the Down Easter (an Amtrack passenger train that goes from Portland, Maine to Boston, Massachusetts) came through. Check out the ferris wheel and the moon rise in the background.