PORTLAND (Day 9 - part 1)

Next door to the hotel was the Holy Donut. These doughnuts are famous in that they use potatoes in the dough! They were quite dense and very filling!

Sean got chocolate sea salt.

I got Maine blueberry, although it tasted more sweet than fruity.

We drove on to Freeport where we visited Chief Passamaquoddy, aka Big F Indian (think Freeport or Friendly!)

Standing 40 feet tall and weighing 1,500 pounds, the statue was built of fiberglass, plywood and steel rods in 1969 to stand in front of the Casco Bay Trading Post (which closed in 1989) to attract the attention of cars passing by on Route 1, which he still does today. He was repainted in 1989 and again in 2006.

Several arrows are lodged in his shield, although those are from vandalism and not original.

We continued our drive south, stopping in Yarmouth to see the EARTHA globe.

You can see the glove through the glass wall.

Completed in 1998, the EARTHA globe was the largest printed image of the Earth ever created. It is a one to one-million scale model and is 42 feet in diameter. One inch represents 16 miles, and one 18-minute revolution equates to a day. It tilts at 23.5 degrees, the same as the planet itself.

If a model of the sun were made, it would be 4,560 feet in diameter. The International Space Station (which orbits 260 miles above Earth) would float 16.5 inches above EARTHA.

EARTHS's skeleton is a structure of 6,120 pieces of aluminum tubing and there are 792 panels, each printed and mounted on a light-weight material.

It is a composite built from satellite imagery (using multi-spectral imagery), shaded relief (indicating elevation change on land), colored bathymetry (ocean depth data) and information about road networks and urban areas.

The massive globe rests on a large base. Motors move it in its two directions. Instead of spinning, it moves in small steps to a specified position.

I walked up to the second and third floors to get different views.

View from the second floor

The third floor

The panels

North and Central America slowly pass by ... eventually arriving at Maine.

Back outside in the parking lot, I noticed a variety of Maine license plates...

Eventually we arrived in Portland.

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