Maine Maple Sunday 2012

Now Playing -  Crazy In Love by The Puppini Sisters

Life -

One thing Linz and I have always enjoyed is doing the local tourist things. We find that a lot of people never take the time to explore the area they live in and we've been guilty of that lately too. SO this weekend, we bit the bullet. The last weekend in March every year, the state of Maine's Maple Syrup makers or Sugarhouses have an open house when visitors can stop by, check out their setups, try some sweets and buy their pure maple syrup. 

We wanted to go last year but lost track of time until we'd missed it, but this year was perfect. We both had it off and the weather, though not the shorts weather we've had the last few days was a perfectly gloomy and wet 45. Just right for coffee and maple goodness and a drive through the hills in a cozy car.

The production of "Real" syrup is a pretty involved process and is more about timing than anything. When nights stay cold but temps rise to above freezing during the days, the sap of the Maple tree starts running and at some point in the distant past, men realized that if they tap that and boil it down, they get a truly delicious treat. Most places still do it the old fashioned way - a couple of hollow spikes in a tree and either buckets or a series of lines that lead the sap down to a series of wood fired boilers that condense 40 gallons of sap into one gallon of syrup in an extremely complex process.  "We boil the crap out of it."  - Bob's Sugarhouse Employee.

Dover Foxcroft

Initially, we'd planned to start out the day at the Firehouse in Dover-Foxcroft, a cute little town to the north that we really like, but the firehouse was PACKED to the brim and we had better things to do than stand in line for an hour. So we headed down the road a bit to Bob's; a small, wooden building along the road with a front end filled with treats and assorted bottles of golden syrup and a back room filled with the massive steel evaporator. The treats, including fried dough and syrup, maple coffee, maple butter, maple carrot cake, maple cider and maple whoopie pies were pretty tasty and doled out by the bored offspring of Bob himself, who chatted amongst themselves about the quality of balloons this year compared to those of yore while studiously ignoring us. 

We ate outside in the cool air then went back in and bought a small tub of the maple butter. In a plastic container that used to say "Maple Cream" but someone cleverly crossed out "cream" with a marker and wrote "butter" in its place. It will be delicious on many, many things. 

The Interior Of Bob's Sugarhouse

But one thing we'd hoped for was missing - we wanted to know what the different grades of syrup tasted like without having to buy a whole bottle of light, medium and dark amber. Next on our path, the Breakneck Ridge farms where they make their own syrup and raise bison for their meat. They promised  maple tea and buffalo burgers.

Where we almost stopped for lunch, the sublime Spring Creek Bar-B-Q

It had started to get colder, hovering around freezing and small flakes started to fall as we weaved further northeast into Maine. About an hour later we found the place, up a somewhat muddy road topped by a sign - 

We walked. As we reached the property, an orange and white dog that we mistakenly thought was called Molly greeted us and, after passing inspection, we were allowed to enter. I was a little bummed that the fire wasn't going in the syrup room, as it was getting cold, but the employees/family at Breakneck was much friendlier and talkative, giving us samples of maple tea, maple Italian dressing, maple whoopie pies and maple buffalo jerky. They also had samples of light and dark amber syrup. 

The light is what most people that have had real maple syrup get which, to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of on pancakes and the like. I enjoy the flavor, but I like it better by itself. The dark was better, it had a deeper, woodsier flavor with a touch of smokiness.  We bought a small bottle of the dark and some jerky and wandered down the hill in the snow to grab a buffalo burger and some buffalo chili.

The food wasn't the greatest. The burger was tender and had the distinct flavor of bison that I like, but it was too thick and small around and far too undercooked for my taste. The chili was better - lots of meat and beans with a taste that reminded me of turkey chili oddly, and it had virtually no spice at all. But sitting under a canopy with the snow drifting around and the cute old farm dog hanging out with us was really nice. 

Overall, it wasn't the tourist extravaganza we'd expected, it seemed like most of the visitors were residents that use the day as an excuse to buy their yearly gallon of syrup, but it was a nice way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon.

The ROUS FAMILY -   

 

 

 

 

It's Bang-Whore, Not Bang-Her!

Now Playing -  I'm Yours (Live) by Jason Mraz

Pastry from Bolley's Famous Franks

Life -  

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by my district manager and asked if I would be interested in transferring up to the Bangor area of Maine. We had lost or were going to lose a few managers up there and he felt that ultimately, even discounting that, they could benefit from my experience with the company. We are very tempted. We are centrally located right now here in Topsham, but we've never really liked the area. It's poorly laid out and most of the people here are oddly pretentious. We thought that living in what was essentially a college town would be fun, but apparently not when it's the illustrious Bowdoin University!

Not implying that the people of Brunswick are wieners.

We don't hate it here by any means, but Linz's job, which is run by fools is getting worse, with things like holding out on owed overtime (And paying it in cash when it is paid) and calling her off with virtually no notice. So we said we'd look into it. There are a ton of hotels up there, being so close to Acadia national park, so Linz should be able to find a job fairly well and we liked what we saw of the area on our initial jaunt up there.

We decided that the hunt deserved our full attention and asked one of Lindsay's friends, Jessica to look after the kids and we planned a trip. We called or emails 14 Realtors, asking them if they had any leads on Rent-to-own, fixer-uppers or rentals that would allow us, our two cats and our two dogs. We also called and left messages for around ten independent listings from newspapers and websites. Now, bear in mind, we started this process over a week  before we were planning the trip. By the time we left for the north, we had heard back from a grand total of three people.

Or the people that never called us back. Probably.

I was shocked. Maybe it was our email, or something, but no one got back to us and those that did was through a ridiculous series of phone tag and email tic tac toe. I don't know if it was because there really wasn't anything much in it for the agents or what, but I was dismayed at the unprofessionalism they displayed. Out west, even if it was a simply worded email response, we would have heard back from 90-95% of those contacted, guaranteed.

Whoopie Pie from Bolley's

But we loaded our mattress into the back of Stormalong and headed out anyway. We'd gotten  a babysitter, the first time the dogs had been watched by a non-family member, in fact, so why not use it? And we wanted to talk to a couple of mobile home and rental places too. (We had an appointment to look at a place, but it was out of our range a bit and the guy seemed very reluctant and odd.)

We really like the area up there. We stopped into Bolley's Famous Franks on the way and grabbed a couple of ridiculously good pastries and listened to local comedian Bob Marley talk about Cahs (Cars) and Sleds (Snowmobiles) on a CD. It was perfect weather. A little overcast but warm and calm, a far change from the last trip. We made a few last ditch calls on the way there and caught one other break, a possible house north of Bangor.

The house would have worked. It was a little small, but it had three little bedrooms and a decent yard. But the previous tenants KIDS had wrecked it, forcing them to replace the carpet and re-paint and the owners, who were clearly the "Management company"'s parents or close relations, judging by the way her kids ran to them when they showed up, decided that they didn't want to risk the pets. Which would have been fine, but they didn't tell us there - we had to call her and leave a message the next day and wait for her to call us back. Regardless of the fact that it had probably been decided 2 minutes after we drove away.

Naturally, we had to stop at a graveyard or two...

The other place we looked at was very nice. The owner had put a lot of work into it and had initially tried to sell it, but there was no takers. It was very unique, being a converted 2 car garage with an upper floor. One the main floor, there was a small laundry room, a living area, the master bedroom and a lavishly huge tub in a small bathroom. Upstairs, accessible only by an outside staircase or a very steep, small spiral staircase were two more bedrooms and a kitchen. It was very cute, had some decent land, but the spiral stairs would have been quite unnavigable for the boys, leaving us no choice but to use the outside stairs in all weather and seasons. And the place was almost $200 more than the place we're in now. Oh, and he was ridiculously overly protective of the place. I don;t blame him, it was awesome and pretty in it's own eclectic way, but it would have been a bad choice for us.

"Awesome Pizza"

Disillusioned, we ate some pizza. Awesome pizza, recommended by the cute 2-screen, family run theater where we later saw Thor. The pizza was thin, awesome and made by cool people and the movie was funny, action packed and very enjoyable. It almost made up for our crappy results. Afterwards, we went to Wal-mart, a gargantuan new structure that was possibly the largest one I've ever seen, and bought some water and a package of peas.

By then it was getting quite late and we cruised around for a bit, looking for a place to park for the night, eventually hitting the Walmart parking lot again and cuddling up in the back of the rig for the night.

The best omlette ever and homemade oatmeal toast!

The next morning was gloomy and rainy, which is our favorite kind of weather. We had a truly phenomenal breakfast at Martha's Diner. I had a corned beef hash omlette, which was thin on egg and thick on filling and cooked perfectly, while Linz enjoyed an asparagus and pepper quiche with real hollandaise sauce. Heavenly!

The Bar Harbor... maybe.

After breakfast, we drove into the Bar Harbor/Acadia area, just to check it out. It was beautiful and we can't wait to head back there for fun to explore. Then we met with David, a salesman at the mobile home and modular home place. He was the most efficient person we've met in regards to this whole ordeal. He had answers, offered us some solutions to our questions and was very friendly. We spent a good amount of time wandering in the houses and trailers, simply because we enjoy that kind of thing. After telling him we'd be in touch, we drove back Bangor way, passing through to the Orono and Old Town area. We'd seen a lot of reasonably priced homes here and wanted to see what we thought of the area. It was awesome. Small town feeling, almost Oregonian (Though that may have been the rain) but quite close to Bangor and less than an hour from Ellsworth.

Random Mobile Home

Finally, we decided we weren't going to accomplish anything more and turned towards home. Augusta is one of the few towns with a Michaels and Barnes & Noble stores in Maine, so we stopped off for a bit of shopping and popped into Bolley's again for dinner, where we found the food as delicious as the serving girl was surly (Very)

Again, not necessarily saying that people that never got back to us are wieners....

Back home, we were pleased to see that our dogs were still alive and kicking and turned in.

So are we moving? I have no idea. We don't love this place we're in, but we don't hate it. It's comfortable. We built an awesome porch off the back! But the stores up north would offer a better chance for promotion and we like the area better. We'll have to see...

The VERY full river in Orono

The ROUS FAMILY -   

 

 

 

 

The North

Now Playing - 
No Woman No Cry by Bob Marley

Life -

A fountain and an awesome old church in a park by Augusta.

 

 Last week, we drove up to the Bangor area for a few reasons. One - we just really wanted to get out of town for a while. Two - We'd never been, and we were told that the Northern part of Maine would suit us well. Three - They need managers up there, and there's a slightly better chance for someone to get into the position of manager if he was in the area, or at least willing to head that way, so we figured we'd better check it out, just in case.

 So we installed the sleeping platform for the first time since we moved here, loaded up the mattress, blankets and dogs and took off. We'd initially planned on driving all day, spending the night in Acadia and heading home the next day in time for me to work at one, but once we got up there,w e realized that it would be too difficult to get packed and home in time for me to turn right around, so we cut our trip a bit short. (It was also blasted cold and windy)

In case that photo above wasn't obvious, the water has clearly been unsafe for quite some time...

Bangor is an interesting area. Smallish, with an outsized downtown area and a number of tentacled roads strewn about, we got lost quite a bit. (The fact that our GPS, ThomThom kept getting us lost did not help either.) Generally, we liked what we saw. It was more Western-feeling than most of the rest of the state, somehow. Obviously, it's a tiny bit more rural and ag based, but there was something more, something a bit more undefinable.

It was really driven home when we left Bangor, cruised through Brewer, which lined the opposite river band, and headed into Ellsworth. More than anything, it felt like we were driving between a couple of random towns in Eastern Montana - a lot of tractor dealers, mobile homes, motels, local businesses and hardware stores... We kind of felt at home. Which is a bit sad, since a lot of people around here think Ellsworth is a bit run down. We ate at a drive-in, where Linz accidentally dropped my wallet in the parking lot (Which we promptly found again) and we had a huge pile of skinny onion rings. The rest of the food was pretty good, though the burgers weren't spectacular, but a large part of that may have been the atmosphere. I was still quite sick, Linz was just starting to get sick and it was cold and blustery.

After we ate, we drove East a bit, stopping in at a comic book store. The shop was a bit of a disaster, with piles of stuff everywhere. Literally. The register was manned by a pleasant young man in a wheelchair and there was no possible way he could even get to 80% of the store. In their defense, they did appear to be installing some new racks of shelves, but man, there was a lot of stuff that looked more like someone's household storage. That said, he was nice and they had a couple of trades we'd wanted, and it was a comic book shop, for heck's sake! If it's open at all, its a good thing.

We took the roundabout route home, through Belfast and around, but didn't really stop much, just to gas up at exorbitant prices or to potty the dogs, who were very good for the ride.

Ellsworth was a fun area. It was clear that it becomes inundated in the summer, being the doorway to Acadia and all, but we could see ourselves being pretty comfortable there. (And Linz should have a cake time of finding a hotel job there, the town was loaded with 'em!)

We plan to make a second, more thorough trip up in a week or so, more then!

The ROUS FAMILY -   

 

 

 

 

West Meets East - Part Two

Now Playing -  
One Day by Chris Isaak

Life - 

We chose the ideal way to start off our vacation with Lindsay's parents on Monday morning. Rich has always prided himself on his backyard. It's fenced in and private, with plenty of shade trees and a lush little garden, plenty of decks and places to relax. And in recent years, he's started feedinging and watching birds. He gets a huge number in his yard everyday, and delights in identifying them, and catering the feed to their liking. So when we were planning the trip and noticed that there was an Audubon sanctuary nearby, we immediately added it. 

Having never been there, it may have been risky, but it paid off extremely well.

 

Tucked off of the road near West Bath, the Hamilton Audubon Sanctuary is phenomenal. It has a two-mile trail through pines and oaks that skirts the edge of the bay, swampland and old-growth forests.

We spent a long time leisurely wandering the path, spotting birds, peeking under mushrooms for fairies, examining fishermen's buckets of bloodworms, and taking in the amazing scent of the pine forest. This was probably the highlight of my trip. I was still fresh and hadn't tired of driving everywhere and it was a joy to wind my way through root lined paths in the middle of nowhere.

Afterwards, we drove for a bit, ending up on Popham Beach. In the summer, this place is insanely busy. They have a pretty substantial parking area and when we went by in July, it was full and folks were parking along the highway. On a windy, rainy day in October however, it was just us. My in-laws surprised me by being remarkably game for this, and we spent some time there, dodging the surf and watching the Atlantic. 

Fort Popham was a logical next stop. Built in 1869, this crescent shaped granite Battery saw a little action before the nearby Fort Baldwin made it obsolete. Nowadays, the place is open to the public during the summer months and it's very impressive to wander around in. You can still see the mounting brackets for the cannons and the spray painted tags of the soldiers stationed here. I had a hard time deciding whether the fort would make a better backdrop for wedding photos or as a stronghold for the zombie apocalypse. 

We ate at a nearby restaurant, Smitty's, or something, where Rich had his first Maine Lobster. He was quite shocked by the small amount of meat you get for the work, though the flavor was as amazing as ever. I had a serviceable cheesesteak. Overall, it was pretty unremarkable restaurant, but it did have great waterfront views. We rolled on home after that. Lindsay watched a little bit of TV with her parents and learned that you can describe the entire plot of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind to some people and they still wont realize that they've seen it until the DVD menu comes up.

 

Reviews Of Unusual Size  

Television



NIKITA
Thursdays, The CW
 

Re: Yet another remake of the Luc Besson story, this hour-long drama follows the adventures of a woman named Nikita. (Maggie Q) Trained by an underground governmental group, Nikita was burned and escaped. Now she's gone rogue and will stop at nothing to bring the organization down.

Outstanding: I've always liked spy shows, and I got a kick out of the 1997 series. 

Unacceptable: Too bad this show was so horrible. The acting was atrocious, the writing even worse, and I think Maggie Q is totally and completely unbelievable as a trained assassin. She's so skinny and gangly that the weapons she's holding look like Rob Liefeld cartoon guns, and her angry face is that of a model concentrating on the catwalk. Which is too bad, because I've liked Maggie Q in some other stuff. And that would be forgivable if the other characters weren't just as bad. None of them look like the clichéd stereotypes they're meant to play. The bad ass controller has a pretty boy face with a neatly groomed douchestache, and the computer nerd looks like a surfer. 

Summary: I will not be watching this again. I suffered through the first two episodes and actually found myself looking forward to paying bills afterward.

1/5