Tempted as I was to hang around my luxurious room listening to iTunes and soaking in the Jacuzzi, I sent myself out to rent a bike and take in the quiet of Peaks Island. Brad and Wyatt's Bike Shop is just down the street—a street that includes a restaurant called the Cockeyed Gull and a market, Hannigan's, which serves as the island's nerve center. Brad and Wyatt's is renowned for the good faith of its owners. If Brad or his son, Wyatt, aren't there, you simply stuff fifteen dollars into a wooden box and take a bike.

As I made a circuit of Peaks (which takes less than an hour), I thought about how islands encourage iconoclasts. Peaks supports artists and musicians and all manner of eccentrics. This point was illustrated for me when I stopped to admire a beach upon which a number of people have built strange Stonehenge-like structures from rocks washed up by the sea. There are standing stones, abstract sculptures, Druidic ruins, and cairns, all of which provide a delightfully weird counterpoint to the lighthouses and lobster boats on the horizon.

I was still thinking about islanders and eccentricity a few minutes later when I passed a sign that read UMBRELLA COVER MUSEUM.

"The Umbrella Cover Museum," explained its curator, Nancy Hoffman, a few minutes later, "is dedicated to the appreciation of the mundane in everyday life. It is about finding the wonder and beauty in the simplest of things, and about knowing that there is always a story behind the cover."

I looked around the museum, at its hundreds of umbrella covers. Then Nancy (whose middle name, she said, is "3") got out her accordion. "Now let's all sing the 'Umbrella Cover Museum' song!"

Whenever skies are gray,
Don't you worry or fret.
A smile will bring the sunshine,
And you'll never get wet!

The next morning, after a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon at the Peaks Café, I left the island on a ferry headed for Great Chebeague. "Each of these islands has a different character," said a gentleman seated next to me on the boat. "Peaks Island has the artists and eccentrics. Great Chebeague is more sedate, more for families who just want the quiet."

A woman who doubles as the bartender at my destination, the Chebeague Island Inn, met me at the pier. Along with my luggage, she accepted an enormous cooler from the ferryboat captain, stuffed with just-caught salmon and lobster and halibut. Then we piled into a van and drove about ten minutes north to the inn, a huge old place on a bluff overlooking the bay.

The Chebeague Island Inn has been here since the 1920s and retains the charm of that era. The lobby is outfitted with dark woods, comfortable chairs, and a big fireplace in front of which a couple of people were drinking cocktails and playing Scrabble. My quarters were typical of 1920s-era hotel rooms, small and spare but neatly appointed. Everything, even the floor, was white, and when the sun poured through the window, I was temporarily blinded.