Tire fire; (chiefly US, idiomatic) A disaster; a chaotic person, thing, or situation. ~ Wiktionary.
Before all you travel bloggers, all of you friends of travel bloggers, all of you who read travel blogs, all of you apostles of Rick Steves, all of you who watch Travel Channel 24/7, all of you who travel extensively, all of you who travel vicariously and all of you who possess a measure of common sense and caution pose the question you’ll be aching to ask after reading this post, let me give you the answers.
Yes, I was penny wise and pound foolish and next time I’ll buy travel insurance. I know I’m uprooting the fun of clucking at me for a conscious blunder that cost me a couple thousand dollars. And yep, I’m admitting to my financial malfeasance and in promising never to do it again I’m pooping the “I told you so” party before the first chips and dip have been set out, but to quote that annoying new fangled phrase, “Sorry, not sorry.”
Waldoboro, population 5,000 give or take, is classic, serene, vintage old coastal Maine. It’s a downtown strip of brick buildings. It’s the inescapable, at least in rural Maine, whitewashed Protestant wooden church fronted by a whitewashed steeple tucked in a surrounding green countryside. It’s a bucolic place dotted with farms, worn barns, aged homes and white picket fences all frequently and unabashedly splashed with the red, white and blue of American flags, banners and bunting. It’s a clearly proud patriotic area with a history that goes back to the 18th century. Located on the Medomack River, Waldoboro became a shipbuilding city where tall ships were constructed in the shipyard and then at high tide floated to the mouth of the river and out into Muscongus Bay.
Le Vatout is a bed and breakfast located just outside of downtown Waldoboro. Our innkeepers Dominika and Linda are gracious hosts running the inn housed in a former farmhouse that was built in the 1830’s. There’s a bit of charming funkiness to the place, particularly the large garden which provides a small green nook where I relaxed one evening with a mystery novel. The grounds are decorated with an assortment of colored lights and gewgaws, particularly the ubiquitous colorful lobster buoys that lobstermen use to mark the location of their traps. The buoys are a common decoration, seen hanging in gardens, from lamposts, on front porches and anywhere else that might seem appropriate to display this symbol of Maine’s crustacean bounty. It was here in this ideal of quiet Americana on a muggy early morning that our vacation turned into a tire fire.
