LenEdgerly.com

Well, here we are back at Starbucks, our home away from our home away from home. The Southwind is still being worked on at Whited Ford in Bangor. We spent the night at an old hotel downtown, the Charles Inn, in hopes that we'd be driving to New Brunswick first thing in the morning. Instead, the leveler jack hadn't been installed and the message from the night crew was that the wrong one had been ordered and driven from Auburn to Bangor. Unbelievable. But the Saturday morning crew weighed in, and my last message from Craig in service was that the jack is installed and they are putting in a new door mechanism, which also needed to be fixed.

So we've been hanging out here at Starbucks. A slim young woman dressed all in black, from corporate, is doing a training session for six women at the next table, showing them a French press coffee maker, passing them little cups to compare samples with New England blend. They are smelling it. "It reminds me when I was growing up, of my neighbor's garage," the supervisor is saying as she sniffs from a cup. I would love to be listening in and maybe recording, but we've got to get this show on the road. It's impressive to see that they are actually being trained in the details of coffee beans and aroma, as opposed to rah-rah corporate platitudes and slogans.

I was planning to write about the frustration of this week of waiting around Bangor, but in truth the frustration has been mixed with pleasant mornings of working on video, reading, doing errands, exploring Bangor. We saw "Little Miss Sunshine" the other night, a whacky take on the perils of a long road trip. At this point, I am really, really ready to head out onto Rte 95 north to New Brunswick. It's a gray day but not raining.

Saturday, September 23, 2006