Yesterday (7/3) was Day 4 of the trip. I biked 21 miles, half of it in rain. Yesterday, unlike the day before, I was better prepared with rain gear, complete with rain pants that started to get caught in my chain until I wrapped a bungee cord around my right ankle to keep things from flapping around.

Just outside my hotel in Rockland, I learned that there is a connection between Maine and Mississippi and bluegrass music.

In a serendipitous departure from my Adventure Cycling route, I decided to head from Rockland for Warren, Maine, to visit Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, which my brother-in-law Tom informed me by email a couple days ago makes the finest hand tools in the world. I was glad I stopped–thanks, Tom! While there, I learned that Lie-Nielsen is also a pattern maker that forges the metal parts for their tools. I’m descended from a line of pattern makers and foundrymen (my grandpa, Joseph Clarence Green, and great-grandpa, Joseph Clayton Green), and it was great to see these nearly-forgotten arts being so successfully preserved and promoted.

Sam at the Toolworks was kind to give me a demonstration of one of their planes, which he used to skin a thin layer off a piece of maple. Thanks to a great tool, and Sam’s skill, he was able to remove a translucent sliver of wood of even depth that looked like a piece of masking tape.

Last night, after a couple of wrong turns in some very hilly backcountry outside of Waldoboro, I checked in to a simple cabin at Moody’s Motel, which was founded, along with a nearby diner, in the 1920s by Bertha and Percy Moody. Of course, I had to have the hot turkey sandwich at the diner, which is quite famous in these parts. I sat at the counter, where you can see marks in the linoleum surface commemorating the elbows of thousands of diners that have rested there over the years.

Oh, and here was a surprise…there is a humorist, Tim Sample, I believe well-known in Maine, who wrote a book of quirky short stories about the people of Maine that I was able to borrow from the office at Moody’s Motel (their autographed copy!). The diner is featured in the first story in the book and is also in the book’s title. The introduction to the book was written by Stephen King. Now that’s something! And in the introduction, King compares Sample to Mark Twain and Artemus Ward. Now that’s something, too! In his introduction, King writes that Tim Sample “is a keeper of his region’s unique way of saying and seeing, the sort of man who assures us that, when it comes to the American idiom, any reports of death are very much premature.” I took a picture of the first page of Stephen King’s introduction to the book in case you are tempted to think I am making this up.

I decided to take today off to celebrate Independence Day with Trudi and her brother Terry and his friend Jane at his one-room cabin in Parsonsfield, Maine. Happy Fourth to you all, and thank you for checking up on me and for your comments!