Mmm-Mmm-Maine!

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Home of the Lobster Roll!

Well, I'm back from a few days with my wife's family on the scenic coast of Maine. As with Chicago and Telluride, you just don't go to such a place without taking a few snapshots. As usual, click for more detail.

Since I mentioned lobster rolls the other day, I figured I might as well start off by showing one of those....


And yes, I do enjoy Moxie, America's oldest soft drink, for which I developed a taste while stationed in Connecticut during my Navy days.

Although Maine is one of Moxie's more important markets, having a taste for it may yet be idiosyncratic -- or at least it is openly regarded as odd by those with less-refined palettes. The first time I ordered it, I told the guy behind the counter how glad I was to be able to order Moxie again, how I'd liked it back in my Navy days, yada, yada, yada....

His reply was to say, "Oh, you're one of those."

That made me laugh.

I have often remarked that Maine reminds me of my home state of Mississippi. Its interior is often a dead ringer, being very rural, with small towns, weathered barns, little white churches, and even the occasional yard car. This resemblance ends in many respects along its coast, which is where these pictures come from.

Here's one from along the seashore.


The day we arrived, a bald eagle was perched atop one of the more denuded trees to the right. That shot, however, was too blurry (and really from too far away) to be worth posting.

Here's a sailboat I spotted in the same general area.


This view of a lobster-fishing town is beautiful.


Point-and-click from a grocery store lot! Within feet from where I snapped it was the below stack of lobster traps.


And I'll close with this howler:


This sign was posted in the water closet of the place I bought that lobster roll shown in the first shot!

And now, back to the grindstone....

-- CAV

10 comments:

SecFox HQ said...

Gus,

We travel to Ogunquit once or twice a year. Maine is a wonderful getaway for the wife and I.

Gus Van Horn said...

You made me look: Ogunquit has a pretty decent write-up in Wikipedia for a town its size.

Anonymous said...

I was in Connecticut in June for a family reunion, and tried my first lobster roll while there. Tasty!

Gus Van Horn said...

There is no better way to have lobster: All the goodness, basically none of the work!

Anonymous said...

Hey Gus,

We share a common native land...the Magnolia state...I knew I wasn't the only OBlogger of redneck descent around here...Ha Ha!!

Gus Van Horn said...

I may know what a "yard car"is, but I wouldn't quite call my background "redneck"! :-)

All the same, it's a pleasant surprise to meet a fellow Mississippian!

Anonymous said...

I'm a native Californian, but I seem to have picked up redneck blood someplace. I realized this one morning after I came down from my apartment wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a military camo hat, 2-day growth of beard, got into my pickup truck and turned on a country music station. Suddenly it crashed home, and I thought "I'm living in the wrong state! I need to buy a hound dog and a gun rack, then move to Georgia!"

Gus Van Horn said...

My wife, too. She's of Northern extraction and her formative years in the South were in New Orleans, which you'd think would make her a lot more like me and the rest of my family.

But noooooo! She just has to listen to country music! We otherwise suit each other very well.

Oh yeah. And to top that off, she's (3rd generation) Irish, but doesn't like Guinness.

Between her and this Moxie-drinking Southerner, I'd say we have a couple of strange birds!

Anonymous said...

My wife is from Tennessee. She doesn't like country music; she listens to hip-hop instead. Go figure.

I think the lesson from this is that geography is not destiny. Darn that pesky free will -- once people start choosing their own values, instead of just mindlessly accepting what the people around them did while they were growing up, who knows where it might end!

Gus Van Horn said...

I rarely listen to hip-hop, and usually do so more or less out of desperation on cross-country drives.

My favorite kind of music is ska, a Jamaican genre which is intermittently popular in America and Britain, and which gave rise to reggae and, indirectly, to some elements of hip-hop.

My wife can listen to (and even enjoy) some of the slower stuff, which can resemble 50's rock. Who knows? Maybe it's something you can both tolerate!