We got out this afternoon and did a little sightseeing. We got lucky and found a window of opportunity with no rain. It’s now raining and windy again as I write. Took a bunch of pictures but I just haven’t had the time to sort through them to find one to add here. If I can find Internet connections in Bar Harbor, our next destination, I’ll get them up. I think you’ll like them.
Eastport is an interesting place – very old and quite economically depressed I would guess. I walked around the village this afternoon and looked at many old houses and churches with nearly all of the them in need of some degree of maintenance and some now beyond help.
Things are expensive and you really feel isolated here. It’s many miles to the next cluster of civilization. There also seems to be an attempt at some kind of art community here, although I didn’t spend much time looking at that sort of thing. For me I was more interested in old architecture and history.
What will tomorrow’s weather bring? God only knows. When we first got downtown, Milt and I were headed in the general direction of the municipal dock. We met a man walking in the opposite direction and I greeted him with a friendly “good afternoon”. Milt responded with, “Beautiful day isn’t it!” You never know with Milt if he is serious or attempting to agitate someone and get a rise out of them.
The man came back with a smile, a hello and then informed us as he continued walking unbroken, that it was going to rain for three more days. A bit later on, after we had scouted out the dock, we met a man with a cane. We struck up a conversation and learned he had lived in Eastport for seventeen years but he hails from Florida and South Georgia. He told us he hates the winters here and has decided to winter back in Florida. He also told us it was going to warm up and be sunny the next three days. Hmmmmmm?
I’m not sure who had the correct forecast as the man with the cane also told us we didn’t need passports to go into Canada and come back to the U.S.. Put that all together with him telling us that where we stood we were only about a mile from Campobello Island but to drive there it was 45 miles.
I think I’ll go with the 3 more days of rain forecast, although I know it has been raining too long when my wife, ever the sickening optimist, says the weather is getting to her to.
We ate dinner at a local restaurant and saloon. This is the first time in my life (no seriously) that I have sent food back to the cook because it really sucked so bad. I suppose had it been a burger or some such nauseating food, I would not have said much, but when the young waitress returned to ask me how my fillet Mignon was, it took a bit but I told her I couldn’t eat it. It was overcooked so badly the Boston Bruins could have used it for a puck.
I’m not a complainer in restaurants and honestly, to my knowledge I’ve never sent anything back but this time I did and believe it or not, I felt badly about it.
The other three in the party said their food was also way over cooked. So, when the waitress returned to give us our bills, I said, “I’m not a cook/chef and I don’t want to come across like a jerk but the problem with my steak was it was over cooked. My wife’s and my friend’s food were also over cooked. You might want to tell the cook he’s over cooking everything.”
She said she would and we gathered our things up and got ready to leave. I needed a tooth pick and so I headed out into the lounge area in search. I couldn’t spy one right away but I got the waitress’s attention and asked her if she had a tooth pick. She went behind the bar and so I walked over to the bar and she passed me a container that had tooth picks wrapped in plastic in it. I took one and commented in a quiet way and with a smile, that she might not want to ever serve a steak again – meaning I was probably becoming a pain in the backside.
At that moment, two women sitting at the bar immediately to my right spoke up and said, “Don’t worry about it. We got our food and it was so over cooked you couldn’t bite into it!”
How does that saying go? If there is good news one person will tell 3 people. If there is bad news, they will tell 300. Let’s just say I hope they find a new cook before the busy summer season sets in up here…..if there is such a thing.
Tom Remington
