An estimated 80 people traveled on two buses from Bangor, Bar Harbor and the midcoast to an anti-Iraq War demonstration in New York on Saturday, joining about 300,000 people in a rally at a small park near City Hall in lower Manhattan.

Diane O’Brien of Lincolnville, along with her husband, Wally, climbed aboard one of the buses at 1 a.m. Saturday, and arrived mid-morning at 23rd Street. The group slowly made its way to the park.

“It was totally jammed up,” with police barricading demonstrators between blocks, she said Sunday. “They unpenned you and let you go when the group ahead of you went.”

Though activists Jesse Jackson and Cindy Sheehan and actor Susan Sarandon spoke, O’Brien could not see or hear them.

“There were so many people,” O’Brien said.

One impression she was left with from this, her first anti-war rally, was the tone of the event.

“It felt like the Common Ground Fair – people were in a good mood,” she said. “There was a lot of humor, and a lot of young people involved.”

In addition to trying to demonstrate to elected officials their opposition to the U.S. presence in Iraq, O’Brien said, the event was uplifting. She arrived home at 4 a.m. Sunday.

Dan Lourie of Bar Harbor has been to many such demonstrations, dating to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, he said. What drove him to attend another one was “outrage and anger with what our government is doing in our name – killing women, killing babies, killing our own young people.”

The action is a “measure of our defiance,” he said.

Like O’Brien, Lourie characterized the demonstration as a “balance of camaraderie with this anger with our government.”

He was moved, he said, by placards telling the story of some of the Iraqi war dead, including an 8-month-old girl killed by a bomb.

Lawrence Reichard of East Orland is also a demonstration veteran.

“I’ve done many of these,” he said.

Reichard recounted one of the chants demonstrators employed: “This is what democracy looks like.”

Demonstrations against the Vietnam War helped turn elected officials against it, he said, “and we hope we will have the same effect this time around.”

Suzanne FitzGerald, 73, of Bar Harbor hopped onto a bus and marched for miles in New York City because it was the right thing to do, she said.

Interviewed Sunday afternoon under cloudless skies while holding up anti-war signs on the Village Green in Bar Harbor, FitzGerald has been a participant in the Sunday afternoon peace vigil that has been a town staple since just after Sept. 11, 2001.

“I was very happy when we got there,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh, we’re not alone.’ We felt surrounded by people who believe the same thing we do and it’s a very comforting thing.”

She said she was particularly struck by a life-sized photograph of a Middle Eastern woman dressed in black.

“The horror in her eyes, and the hand that was raised to her mouth in horror,” FitzGerald said. “It made me all the more convinced that nonviolence is the message we should all be spreading.”

She marched under a placard emblazoned with quotes from Gandhi and from Martin Luther King Jr., and she said she heard no counter-protesters denouncing the overarching message of “basic human rights.”

Dan Lourie said that when the buses arrived in New York City he found a mass of people that stretched for 15 to 18 blocks in each direction. The group carried both “unbelievably creative signs” and their “outrage, anger and disillusionment” with the Bush administration, Lourie said.

“There were families with kids of all ages,” he said. “There was a sea of people. Everybody was smiling, but everybody was serious.”