A drive thru Maine – lighthouses, foliage and good food

We left the Captain's Inn in Alma and drove through Fundy national park towards Saint John and then St Stephens to cross the border. Of course we couldn't resist another stop at McKays blueberries (we stopped there on our way to Canada). This time we were more equipped, had a knife! 🙂 and took a cranberry/blueberry pie.

Crossed the border, again with no problems and then drove some of the beautiful roads we passed a week earlier. And I couldn't stop admiring this craziness of having a cemetery in such beautiful places so I took some photos. Then we stopped to fuel and bought some strange drinks to taste – one was a blue lemonade soda and the other tasted like a vanilla coke that I quite liked!

A few more hours and we were in the area of Belfast which has another famous lobster roll place, "Young's Lobster Pound" which is a bit hard to explain … it's not a restaurant at all, it's a big hangar at the harbor, but it won so many prizes in the last years – best chef, best lobster roll, best takeaway that we had to try it 🙂 .

We ordered a simple lobster roll and it was good as usual! It came in a bun with some lettuce and pickles and a nice portion of lobster meat. The couple who were after us in line ordered a whole lobster, and you can see below how it looks.

We wanted to reach Camden and saw we were OK with the time ,so we decided to enter Camden Hills state park where there's a well known lookout from the top of Mt Battie over Camden. We had to pay $6(!!) each to enter but when we reached the top we saw it was worth it.

Just when we thought we already saw everything the foliage has to offer we were proved wrong. We got to see Camden's harbor down below and between us (top of the mountain) and the sea, the whole mountain was covered in colorful trees as far as the eye could see!

Camden & nearby lighthouses

Our next stop was Camden, a very touristy town with little cute shops, that you can wander for an hour or two 🙂 . There was this one shop with very weird old things and more "standard" shops with souvenir like stuff. At the corner of the main street we saw a pub called "Seadog" and we assumed that's where we're going to spend the evening.

We checked in to our motel which was like 1 mile out of downtown, but still within a walking distance. After a while we went for dinner at the Seadog, a pub with its own brewery, and I had a flight of 10 beers! Some of them were really interesting! Beers with blueberry, peach, cranberry and so on.

We didn't have plans on how to fill the next day, but for a start we went to visit the Rockland lighthouse, which was not easy to find 🙁 . Anyway, once we found it and parked the car we had to walk 1.5 miles on a dock made of rocks just to reach it. Around us we saw some boats coming to check on their lobster ponds.

However, the lighthouse itself is not worth the trouble … But the next lighthouse we visited, Peramquit lighthouse was really nice! It had some nice rock formations around it and a small museum inside ($2 per person).

Eating in Portland, Maine

We reached Portland (Maine) late afternoon and were in a race to eat in many places since it was our only day in the city 🙂 . We had a list of a few places and we decided on one plate in each of them, so we hopped from one to another, luckily all were on the same block!

We started with a lobster roll at Eventide that was small and a bit pricy. Then we went to Duckfat for a "poutine" which is a local Maine dish, but basically it's fries covered with gravy and cheese. Our next stop, for dessert, was the Honey Paw where we had a soft vanilla ice cream covered with hot chocolate sauce and honey comb – this was delicious!! By now we were quite full …

We went out to a local bar, nothing fancy, and started talking with the barman and another couple who sat next to us. We had jello shots (WTF?!) and I loved the barman's response when we asked why to drink it that way, he said "why not?". Simple 🙂 .

But then he asked if we knew the "red snapper". Apparently this is another Maine's specialty. Basically it's a very colorful hot dog … so he served us with this and even though we couldn't have a bite due the afternoon food we had, we couldn't say no …

But then we opened a discussion about what we should eat the morning the next day since it was our last (and only) one in Maine. We started reading out places from TripAdvisor and they were like "you have to go there", "you must eat it" but we were like "hey, we only have one day!".

Where to eat breakfast in Portland?

Eventually the morning after we stopped at Holy Donut and bought half a dozen of donuts in intriguing flavors like maple-bacon, dark chocolate sea salt and apple cider, to take and stopped at Dutch's for a good fresh locally made bagel breakfast!

Besides the good bagels I really liked the decoration in this place, having nice paintings on the walls (one of them was of Cadillac mountain, the one we visited at the beginning of our trip). And that was the end of the trip!