Allen always says we bring good weather with us when travel, but today we sure broke our streak. The day brought a rainy drive through hills and on interstates for most of the day, making for a slow 300 miles. But a lunch stop in historic Portsmouth, New Hampshire, brewing home of Smuttynose beer and home, for a time, to John Paul Jones, gave us our first lobster roll meal, a walk around a beautiful, substantial downtown, and a delicious taste of seacoast towns to come.
We'd driven coastal Maine's Route 1 years ago at the end of a week on Mt. Desert Island provided by the Pendletons, so it was a trip down memory lane to do so again. We were reminded of our visit to the Bowdoin College campus, where our friend, Erin Carney and future husband, Pete Durning, attended, and of the stop at the DeLorme map and globe company's HQ, home of the world's largest globe. (I still recall that photo of Holm pretending to run around it.) But the road is now chock-full of t-shirt and ice cream shops, galleries of dubious artistic merit, vacation rentals, and traffic, not as picturesque as hoped. Still, several towns are now on our list to explore, we hope, some other day, among them Rockland and Camden (a town where half the homes are for sale, most of which sport Sotheby's signs).
Belfast turned out to be as quiet as we remembered.
Nice homes, some public art (I like the chair made from skis),
lots of outdoor restaurant seating. Our hotel looks over some small cottages right to the water, a nice way to close the day's drive.
Dinner at an adventurous, not-too-successful, menu-wise, waterfront restaurant (rope-grown mussels, i.e.) which also serves 90% of all the Marshall's Wharf microbrew crafted immediately next door (their only outlet). We both thought its avant garde biergarten looked inviting, and I liked that outdoor light strings used real lampshades.
No comments:
Post a Comment