Day Eleven – Lobster Pound!

July 1, 2016 – Schoodic Peninsula and LOBSTAH!

No alarm today!  Of course the sun comes up at 4:45 and we’re on the east side of our building…Busia (Marilyn) calls her grand daughter, Hailey, to wish her a happy fifth birthday, via FaceTime.  Such fun! Then it’s down to breakfast.  Taylor is on the desk this morning and we have a great chat with him, all about gluten-free restaurants and living with GF intolerance on a college-student’s budget!  He’s going to Johnson & Wales, so he knows about food!  He recommends some GF restaurants, including Route 66, Rosalee’s Pizza and the Thirsty Whale.  Marilyn asks him about a “lobster pound”.  He says those are restaurants where they cook your lobster outside in big food-fired cookers and are usually by the water.  You can eat it there or take your live lobster home to prepare.  He recommends Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound because all the guests who go there come back to the hotel to rave about it! Taylor gives us directions to there and to the Schoodic Peninsula, and a map, of sorts.

We are all ready to go, so we leave right from breakfast and head over to the next “finger” of land.  Our little map gets us started but doesn’t go all the way to the peninsula and we wind up visiting a lovely little park called, Lamoine State Park.  The nice gentleman at the entrance gate gives us another map and directions to keep us going.  Of course, he leaves out a road or two and we wind up with the Waze lady who gets us back on track. First, though, he tells us to go down into the park and turn around, as that will be easiest.  He probably doesn’t realize that we’ll be taking a photo or two, first!  Bet he wondered how hard it was for us to just turn around!  No wonder we were lost!

Presently we pass through Winter Harbor and are in the part of Acadia National Park, which is called the Schoodic District.  There is a loop road and we mean to drive it!  Mostly we’re looking for more of those dramatic crashing waves; but there are other fun things to see, too, like another light house and what low tide looks like a little in from the coast.

We had though to spend an hour or so.  What were we thinking??  Once you get hooked on catching the perfect wave, it ‘s really hard to quit.  It must be like smoking or doing drugs!  

There aren’t as many pullouts and scenic views in Schoodic;  but there are enough to keep us occupied for several hours!

We finally holler “Uncle” and head back to Bar Harbor.  We’ve already committed to stopping for lobster, although a wine tasting wouldn’t go amiss.  We passed a sign for one this morning but we come to Trenton Bridge first and since all we’ve had since breakfast is a handful of almonds, dinner wins.

There is nothing at all fancy about a lobster pound.  You get into one line to order your lobsters.  Then you fill out a questionnaire about what else you’d like, like butter, potato salad, cole slaw, corn on the cob, etc .  You can also get clams and sandwiches.  And they have wine!  We settle on a 1 ½ pound (small) lobster each with cole slaw and water. The man takes our lobsters, puts them in a bag and hands them off to a kid who takes them outside to cook. Our number is 17 and we sit outside to wait for it to be called.

Marilyn fetches our tray with all our fixin’s including a cracker and pusher/pick for each of us.  We dutifully don our bibs and set about dismantling our dinner.  Neither of us has ever done this before.  My idea of lobster is a tail that has already been mostly removed from the shell!

We attack with gusto, although Marilyn is a little apprehensive.  We rip off a claw each and try to separate the knuckles.  She does better than I and I have a moment of fear that I’ll never get to eat! Finally I make some progress and the meat is so sweet and succulent!  You don’t even need the butter;  but it sure is good that way!

There is a very helpful black lady with a lilting Islands accent who guides us through the rest of the steps once we’ve mastered the claws.  When we rip open the body she shows us how to clean out the alimentary canal and I find that mine is a female with eggs.  She also tells us that the green gunk is their liver and it is okay to eat but Marilyn is totally grossed out and I, too, remove most of mine.  We even get most of the meat out of the eight little legs!  By the end, I am stuffed!!  I’m so glad we didn’t get the large ones!  Our whole meal of two lobsters, two cole slaws and two bottles of water only costs about forty-five dollars!  Such a deal!  We’ll be back!

Home again!  We had thought about going into town to check things out;  but we just can’t do another thing tonight!  Plus, we’ve got to get up early tomorrow for our whale-watching cruise.  Instead we open our wine from the tasting and have some more cheese and open a new box of GF crackers, all of which we take outside onto our little balcony, so we can enjoy while we watch the sky turn sky-blue pink. 

Marilyn’s computer is complaining that its start-up disk is almost full and it won’t download her photos.  She moves a ton of videos onto an SD card in hopes of freeing up space.  I sure hope it works.

Addenda:  I’ve realized that there are some things I’ve left out of previous posts.  One is that we have only seen three political signs the whole time we’ve been in Maine, and they’ve all been for Bernie! 

Another is a joke on myself!  We were walking to our car in the Comfort Inn parking lot and I was thinking of something else, or playing with my phone, or something.  I walked up to the four-door gray car and opened the passenger door, only to hear a lady’s voice say, “Are you coming home with me?”  Oops!!

And another note, this one from the museum as the Pemaquid Light.  The cool old volunteer showed us an engine called a one-lunger.  It only had one cycle but it would run forever.