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Flat Stanley Arrives in Maine!

February 24, 2009 marked the arrival of Flat Stanley in Farmington Maine. Here you are inside the Post Office Box which was your home for an undetermined amount of days. Your hostess, Theresa, was in Mexico when you arrived and couldn't greet you until February 24 when she came back to town. You arrived during one of two spring breaks that Farmington schools (and many other schools in the state of Maine) have during the spring semester. The first break is during February. Students often go skiing at one of the many ski resorts in the state during that break. Sugarloaf and Saddleback are two major resorts that are only an hour away from Farmington. Saddleback has the highest base elevation of any ski resort in New England. Ski Titcomb is a local place to ski, only 10 minutes away. Where your friends in Dallas might take dance lessons or play soccer after school and on weekends, Farmington students take ski lessons and go skiing after school. The second break during spring semester is in April. During this break, many people leave the state for a little vacation from "Mud Season". In Texas, you probably have four seasons, but in Maine, we have five: summer, autumn, winter, mud, and spring. There's usually so much snow that's accumulated on very frozen ground that when the temperatures get warmer and the snow starts to melt, only the top of the ground is thawed enough to soak in the water so the water has nowhere to go. Instead, all that water sits on the top of the earth and makes a lot of mud. Add the rain to it and it's pretty messy for a couple of weeks.

Farmington was incorporated in 1794, 47 years before Dallas was established. It's a very old community as are many towns and villages in Maine. You actually enjoyed hanging out in the quaint old post office--Theresa's post office box was just your size with a window so you could see many of the 7,500 nice people who live in Farmington as they came in and out of the post office. Compare that population to your population in Dallas of 1,240,000 which is 165 times larger than Farmington. Even though Farmington isn't very big, many famous people are from here including Chester Greenwood who invented the ear muff in 1873 at the age of 15 and Seth Wescott who won a medal in the Olympics for snowboarding. Seth's mom is a professor at University of Maine at Farmington and is a friend of Theresa's. Theresa also works at University of Maine at Farmington where she teaches future teachers how to use computers in their classroom.