Travels WithJohn and Janice

Travel blog

Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.

Showing 2 of 236 posts

Bob Bittner at the DJ console of WJTO, his Bath, Maine AM radio stationUnited States
3 min read2012

Dateline July 25, 2012, Bath, Maine, and the Radio Guy

Out of Acadia and south down the Maine coast to Bath, to visit Bob Bittner, who has known Janice since grade school. They had not seen each other since high school, until Facebook reconnected them. Bob and his wife Raisa, an architect who redesigned their place themselves, live on a stretch of water acreage with a great room and a view from the back porch. Bob has been in the radio business for twenty years and owns two AM stations playing adult standards from the 1930s through the 1960s, drawing from a library of more than 5,400 records. We toured the studio (78s, 33s, and 45s for the youngsters), and the garage, where Bob's lifetime license-plate collection runs into the thousands. And then we waved goodbye, and headed home, the long summer through four Canadian provinces and a slice of Maine quietly closing behind us.

#maine#bath-maine#bob-bittner
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The view of Bar Harbor and Frenchman Bay from the summit of Cadillac Mountain, the tallest peak on the Atlantic seaboardUnited States
6 min read2012

Dateline July 25, 2012, Acadia National Park

From Campobello across the FDR Bridge into Maine, and on to Mount Desert Island for Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor. The island is the second largest on the US east coast, with 26 mountains on it, including 1,530-foot Cadillac, the tallest along the Atlantic seaboard. Bar Harbor itself, a Gilded Age resort that once rivaled Newport, was largely lost to a fire in 1947 that smoldered underground through the winter, then was rebuilt. Plus a stop at the Desert Mountain Oceanarium for a hatchery tour with lobsterman David Mills, who explained how Maine's lobstermen voluntarily protect their own brood stock with size minimums, size maximums, and notched females, and why the catch has been growing year over year because of it. Then the history of Acadia itself, George Dorr's 43-year campaign, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s carriage roads, and the long story of how 47,000 acres got preserved.

#maine#acadia-national-park#bar-harbor
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