Bowdoin College in main is another one of those small New
England colleges that has the reputation for having a very good art museum . It’s
also another one of those college art museums that was closed for renovations
in 2012 when I last visited many such institutions on a trip to New England, in
the middle of an era of low borrowing costs when it seemed like almost every
other museum was expanding or upgrading its facilities.

Well, now I’m back in the area and figured I’d go check it
out. Bowdoin also has a couple other claims to fame as one of the top small
private colleges in the country. I’m not sure why, but until a few years ago I
even thought it was an Ivy League college like Dartmouth. The Ivy League is
technically just an athletic conference of eight schools, but Bowdoin is in a
similar academic league as those eight. Bowdoin College is associated with
polar exploration as the alma mater of famous polar explorers Robert Peary and
Donald MacMillan, so the campus also hosts the Peary-MacMillan Museum of Arctic
Exploration, a small institution that was open on my 2012 visit. The connection
with Peary and MacMillan are also the reason Bowdoin’s sports teams are the
Polar Bears – not because polar bears live in Maine. As far north as Maine may
be, Bowdoin College and Brunswick are physically closer to the Equator than the
North Pole.

Bowdoin’s recent claim to fame is for having been named the
college with the best campus food in America. So how do I get to try some of
that great college food? Although it’s finals week and school and the students
are still around, it’s not exactly as if anyone can walk into student dining
halls and pay for a meal .

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is not very large but is
quite nice with galleries on two floors displaying permanent and temporary
displays from the museum’s collections along with a temporary exhibition of
contemporary art. Why do most museums feel the need to waste so much good space
on temporary exhibitions of contemporary crap by untalented current day artists
while keeping a lot of their good stuff hidden in storage? I don’t get it.

Brunswick is just a few miles north of Freeport, my other
reason for making it to the vicinity, because Freeport is the home of L.L. Bean
and its flagship store. I like L.L. Bean and I like catalog and online shopping
for many things. I usually prefer, though, to buy clothes where I can try them
on to make sure they at least fit the current but always changing contours of
my frequently bloating and slimming body. On this trip it was new hiking boots
I was most in need of since my last pair disintegrated on a jungle trek in
Colombia. I found and bought what I needed and was in and out pretty quickly,
so the shopping experience wasn’t too painful overall.