Onward to Walt's

Around 8:30 I went in and had breakfast with Tom. He'd made a pot of coffee—strong coffee—and I had a cup of that to warm myself up while Tom scrambled up some eggs. Strong coffee on an empty stomach is not a smart move for a person like me who's not used to caffeine. I compounded my folly by adding sugar and then topping it off with an ounce or two of artificially flavored French vanilla synthetic creamer-like food substance (I don't know what possessed me!)—thinking maybe it'd cover up the bitterness of the coffee. What I didn't realize was that the stuff was pre-sweetened. Since I had already added sugar to the mug, the result was a cloyingly sweet beverage...so I had to add even more coffee to cut the sweetness. Not wanting to impugn the quality of my host's coffee, I drank it all...but awhile later my hands started to shake. And I had to take a bathroom break about every half hour for most of the rest of the day. Of course, one of the nice things about a motorhome is that you carry your bathroom with you...so you don't have to go looking for a service station with clean rest rooms. Just set it on cruise control and stroll into the back...no, just kidding!

I stayed around awhile after breakfast, talking with Tom, before finally heading out around 11:00. A rather late start, it's true...but it was only 191 miles to my next destination, Eastport, so I figured I'd have no problems. But I hadn't taken into account the road I'd be traveling: Maine's Coastal Route 1. This picturesque two-lane road passes through one small town after another, so every time you get up to 45 or 50 mph, you hit a village and the speed limit drops to 35 again. The countryside is pretty, though—in half a dozen trips I have yet to see a part of Maine I didn't like. I would have loved to stop and photograph some of the scenery I passed. But I was running late and feeling guilty about it...so I confined myself to one stop on the banks of the Kennebec river, and then pressed on.

The expected four-hour drive took a little over six hours (that'll teach me to trust Street Atlas USA's estimates!), so I didn't reach Eastport until late afternoon. I found Walt's big Victorian house on Key Street without difficulty, having been there a few times before. To my embarrassment, though, I managed to knock over a wooden post while trying to back Gertie into the driveway. Oh, the post was old and rotted, and Walt wasn't upset...but still...well, if nothing else, it shows that I need to get cracking and install that rear-view video system I built last year.

As it was, the driveway turned out to be so slanted that I couldn't get Gertie level (important in order to keep the refrigerator happy) even with four layers of Lynx leveling blocks...so at Walt's suggestion I brought Gertie around to the other side of the house and parked on the lawn there. (Hey, this is Maine—if you don't have an old vehicle or two parked on your lawn, you're not a native!) This location was less than ideal, as it meant that I had to walk around three sides of the house to get to the only door in use...but at least it was a nice broad level space with no posts to run into.

Walt welcomed me and soon presented a dinner of pork chops, peas and summer corn. Now, you have to understand that I'm just this side of being a vegetarian. That slab of steak at Tom Ensminger's was more red meat than I'd eaten at one sitting in years. And here I was facing yet another chunk of meat. Fortunately, Walt is such a superb cook that I enjoyed it. As it turned out, this visit was to be one night after another of meat...but thanks to Walt's culinary skills, it was no hardship!

After dinner and a bit of ice cream, we stayed up, talking of this and that. There's always plenty to talk about with Walt. I first met him when he was running the machine shop at the Plasma Physics Lab, where I worked in the Eighties. Besides being a superb machinist—not just a craftsman but a real artist—he shared many of my interests: animation, science fiction, flying, technology in general. But Walt is twenty years older than me, and has had a lot more experiences, so he's a fountain of knowledge and a treasure-house of interesting anecdotes.

He's flown a Hawker Hurricane in ground attack missions for the RAF during the last part of WWII, owned more than a hundred cars (including some real gems, like a Lagonda), plus various motorcyles, boats and airplanes. In his teens he did a "Wall of Death" motorcycle act at county fairs. He's sailed to England on the Queen Elizabeth II and flown back on the Concorde. He's built and rebuilt steam engines, car engines, boats, planes...you name it.

Everything Walt has owned, he's worked on—repairing, improving, customizing. He has a basement full of machine tools, some of them specialized devices he invented himself, and he can fix or fabricate just about anything you can imagine, and a lot of things you probably can't. He's a man I admire greatly and have learned a lot from.

And of course his ongoing and meticulous restoration of the big Victorian house he lives in keeps him busy...he's been working on it for fifteen years now! I can't help admiring the many period details he's added, even though I'm not normally a lover of the ornate Victorian style.

After awhile I pulled out my PowerBook and a DVD I wanted Walt to see. Walt lacks a DVD player (although like me, he's a LaserDisc collector and has quite a library of movies in that format), but my ever-present PowerBook serves admirably as a portable DVD player. So we sat on the bed and watched parts of "The Wild, Wild, West."

I say "parts of" because this is a really stupid movie...but it has some wonderful (if imaginary) Victorian machinery, most of it created by the villain of the piece: evil genius Dr. Arless Loveless. The pièce de resistance is an eighty-foot steam-powered mechanical tarantula, and I knew Walt would love this masterpiece of mechanical extravagance, so I skipped all the badly scripted action sequences and feeble attempts at humor, and went straight to the scenes with the machinery. The smoke-belching steam-powered spider (computer-generated, of course) was magnificent. We both enjoyed it very much.