New England 10/3 Bath, ME

Oops - yesterday's post was titled "10/3 Portland" and should have been "10/2 Portland"

Today is Thursday, 10/3, and we're going to Bath, ME.

We walked around a neat old shopping area on the Main Street and then walked around looking at some old houses - kind of boring. There was a neat looking church, so I took this picture across a park:




I promised Nana a picture of at least one of the old houses, so here it is:




Finally we go to the interesting part of the day - the Maine Maritime Museum! This is on the grounds of the old Percy & Small Shipyard, where they used to build wooden ships.

O.K., this is a bad picture of the lower part of a triple-expansion steam engine, but I wanted to show Karen and Joni where it was built:



Now here's the cool part of the tour. They built the largest wooden ship ever in America on the lawn here and slid it down into the water in 1909 - more than a hundred years ago. There is a sculpture that is the same length, width, and height as the real ship, on the same lawn where the ship was built:



The white stuff at the left shows the shape of the bow (front) of the ship; the white stuff at the right shows the shape of the stern (back) of the ship. The six flag poles show the location of the six masts (it was a sailing schooner, designed to carry coal). The flag poles are 70 feet shorter than the masts were! To get an idea of the size of this ship, here is a picture of Dottie and me sitting on the frame of the bow, the left of the picture above:



We're the really small dots in the lower right corner of the picture!

Here is a model of the ship:




Dottie and I crawled into this lobster trap - I wouldn't want to meet a lobster that fits in here:




Right next to the museum is (are?) the Bath Iron Works, which still make ships for the U.S. Navy.

- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa