TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 08, 2009
I spent my 4-day weekend visiting my family in Maine. I arrived on Friday morning in Portland where I immediately started eating some lobster. For brunch I stopped at Bintliff’s American Café in Portland for some Maine Lobster Benedict. Mmmm. After walking around The Old Port for a few hours, we picked up some lobsters to cook at home and had a nice lobster feed for dinner with some steamers, corn on the cob, and Allagash Curieux bourbon-barrel aged beer. Mmmmm. On Saturday, my parents and I headed to Downeast Maine for a 2-day trip up to the northeast tip of the state. The first place we stopped was Acadia National Park where we had more lobster... this time, it was lobster rolls at Thurston's Lobster Pound. Next we hiked some of the carriage trails and stopped at the Jordan Pond House for popovers. Later in the afternoon, we took a walk around Bar Harbor before heading to the Blue Hill Fair. We spent the night in Ellsworth and then went east through blueberry country where I had some delicious haddock and America's best blueberry pie at Helen's Restaurant in Machias. Nearby we stopped at Jasper Beach, a mile-long beach of smooth jasper stones. As the waves move the stones, they make a really strange sound as they slide against each other. The only other beach like this in the world is in Japan. We moved further east, actually to the most eastern point in the United States: Lubec, Maine where you can see the beautiful red and white striped lighthouse at Quoddy Head State Park. My next mission was to get to Campobello Island, which is in Canada. I had a passport, but my parents did not and starting this June, you needed proof of citizenship to get back into the USA. So I walked into the customs station and explained the situation to the officials there who seemed quite shocked that I just walked into their office, but they said it was fine for us to go and gave us a sheet of paper saying we were "non-compliant". So, we crossed the bridge into Canada and went to Roosevelt Campobello International Park and visited The Roosevelt Cottage where FDR spent many vacations as a child and during his presidency and walked one of the hiking trails near the cottage before starting the long ride home.
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