Um, yeah, about all those adventures I was going on? “Hitting the road?” Have you seen what they’re getting at the pumps lately?

Still, my editors do enjoy getting content on occasion. And what better way to force my debit card into the pump, in the name of providing content, than to check another item off of our to-get-to list? Mrs. Tourist and I have been planning to get to the Lighting of the Nubble for all of the six Christmases we’ve been here, but no soap as of yet. Well, get out the red pen! There’s a check mark to put down on the list now.

As I’ve said before, I’m not much of a festival and big crowd guy. But I am a rocky Maine coast guy, a deserted resort town guy and a lighthouse guy, and I am absolutely a Christmas fanatic. Put it all together and you’ve got the perfect Saturday outing.

In theory, at least.

Actually, it was a great time, with a few issues to contend with. But we’ll get to those later. First, the good stuff. The drive down to York in the lowering sun was lovely. We were armed with a stack of the best-of-the-best Christmas CD’s for the juke: Bing, Sinatra, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey. The drive up Rt. 1-A through York never fails to make me gasp, from the 18th Century architecture to the ‘00s Sotheby’s manses to the opening up of downtown York, surf shops to the left, open Atlantic and the Nubble Light to the right. The moon last night was an indescribable oblong squash, casting a dancing beam over the rising tide. We parked and jumped on a waiting school bus for the short ride over to Sohier Park, the setting sun casting a fiery red-pink glow over the southern horizon while clouds moved in from the north to obscure the moon.

Setting...

I often find myself wishing I could have been of another time, either the 1940’s Ebbets Field Brooklyn of my father or the era of the lone lighthouse keeper in the pre-automation age. A drive past Sohier Park always takes me to that earlier longing. The Nubble Light has a long checkered history, and I feel it every time I gaze upon the tower. We don’t get this far out too often, so it was an awesome feeling to be that close.

Upon arriving, we got in line for free hot chocolate and cookies, while the York High School Chamber Singers set up and members of a varsity team handed out free ornaments. What a great time! What a wonderful Christmassy event!

Waiting for grub.

And then we realized that we had, apparently not reading the literature very well, arrived a full hour before the lighting.

Did I mention that there were issues? Like the fact that it was rather cold on the open Atlantic? Showing up an hour before the event was kind of not ideal. We toughed it out, having driven over an hour to get there for the event, but it required a lot of walking (circuits uphill from the parking lot to the top of the hill, downhill from the top of the hill to the parking lot) and standing around in the chill. We had layered, but not quite enough. Not fun.

Issue 2: Logistics. The stage where the chorus…and the emcee that would narrate the countdown to the lighting…was in the lower parking lot. The best view of the lighting was at the top of the hill, practically out of earshot of the lower parking lot. I counted the half-hour from 5:30 to 6:00 on my cell phone, and I think it was “3” before we picked up the countdown from over yonder.

Perspective. You can almost make out the best vista of the light at the top of the hill from the parking lot.

Issue 3: Our camera. In retrospect, our four-year-old Olympus S400D, with all of 4 megapixels and no digital image stability, is kinda-sorta dated. As a result, it’s probably not the greatest camera to use if you don’t want blurry images while shivering in the cold. (Christmas is coming up, hint-hint, my peeps.)

Blur. Great band: lousy photographic by-product of shivering.

It really was a lovely event, though, and now it’s been checked off of our to-do list. After the fact, I feel much more Christmassy, and we both felt much much better reliving the events over pints of Guinness at Bull Feeney’s.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a much warmer night.

Can we go now?!?!?!?

Got an idea for a story? Do you know of Maine people, places and things I should visit? Drop me a line and tell me where to go.