Which you probably won’t. Way off of the beaten path.
Entering fall, wanting a road trip, Eileen and I headed to Lubec again. This is a little gritty fishing town on the Bay of Fundy, right across from FDR’s summer home on Campobello. There is nothing here except for isolated beauty and peace. We stay at the Inn on the Wharf, a comfortable place with really beautiful rooms and a crazy good lobster shack type restaurant.
Eileen had an excellent salad featuring all local stuff. I had the crabcake… four ounces of perfectly fresh crabmeat slapped on a griddle and heated through. No filler, no nothing, incomparably good. The wine list tops out with J. Lohr Chard and Cab, both quite drinkable.
We spent the next day doing nothing but the short drive to Campobello. It’s a lovely small island, no prosperity but no poverty. You can see that the Roosevelt gardens are beautiful, but not to walk in driving rain and fog. Our Campobello lunch was at the Porch at Friar’s Bay Inn. Eileen had chili, almost as good as Moody’s Diner. I was thinking seafood, but the hamburger was from Prince Edward Island cattle. Six ounces, gently formed, NOT smashed, cook medium-rare. Excellent fries… this is potato country. Dinner back at the Wharf, Eileen had a burger (gasp!), I had the mussels, one pound, steamed, nothing but the ocean distilled.
Breakfast at the Wharf is incredible, featuring the Wharf Potatos, chewy and muscular, some of the best potatos on the planet.
We didn’t pack enough books, so looked on line for a bookstore between Lubec and Riviere du Loup. The website for ‘Volumes’ in Houlton claimed to have 250,000 items. Sounded like BS, but we went anyway. This is a huge, great, bizarre bookstore; the count could be accurate. Rooms of used books probably cover more than a football field. In 20 minutes we picked up 8, covering every possible field. I haven’t read it yet, but I am very sure that I got the ultimate bathroom book:
We got to Auberge de la Pointe in Riviere du Loup that afternoon. The entrance, off a busy road, was not promising, but this is a wonderful hotel. Our huge suite had a panoramic view of the St. Laurence River. Our first night we had dinner at ‘l’Espadon’ restaurant. It was excellent, although with one disappointment: The wine list on line offered 1998 Vieux Telegraphe for ~US$ 190. I was ready for that, but the somm informed me that it had sold out the first month of the season. However we found 2015 Guigal Hermitage for ~$US 130. The wine list in general is noteworthy for wines with bottle age at reasonable (about double US retail) prices. Eileen had a salad, with a wonderful lettuce we did not recognize, followed by a vegetarian paella. I had a local lamb shank. All were excellent.
The next day the goddam rain still followed us, so we lazed. Good as l’Espadon was, we opted for Mirador, the hotel’s casual bar restaurant with truly spectacular river views. The food is pub grub at a high level, not quite as good as l’Espadon. Eileen had a salad, slightly different but as good as the previous night’s, I had Japanese fried chicken and we split an order of beef dumplings. All good. For wine, we had The Good Stuff lined up in our room, so Eileen had just a glass of 2023 Sossego Alentejano (better than good) and I had a glass of 2024 Le Argille Pinot Grigio (adequate).
I’ll post separately on the wines we had in the room that night, carrying over into the following night, and link to this.
Leaving Riviere du Loup we tried to make the voyage from Pohenegamook to the new Tekakapimak contact station at Katahdin Woods & Waters National Monument. This is a beautiful drive through mostly empty farmland and hills. We didn’t get to the contact station, dammit! I had forgotten that it was called a contact station and just asked my GPS to take me to the Katahdin Woods & Waters visitor center at Patten Maine (I was daunted at either asking voice recognition for Tekakapimak or typing it in). After five miles of a poor dirt road off of Rte 11, a sign said ‘Entering Katahdin Woods & Waters National Monument’. A hundred yards further up the road was an outhouse with a rack with maps… the contact station was another ~15 miles. There had been another (probably much better) road we could have taken if there were signs or a map. We couldn’t backtrack as we had a dinner reservation, which we did not want to miss.
That last night of the trip took us to Bangor and a relatively new, outstanding restaurant called Utopia. Many thanks to Kirk Grant for the tip! It’s bright, loud and cheerful with a very mixed clientele. Reserve ahead! We saw half a dozen walk-in couples turned away. House made pasta is the Stuff. Eileen had mushroom and cheese, I had chicken parm. Both were oustanding, but the dish of the trip was the special, a mushroom soup that was more like a stew and as intensely and perfectly flavored as you can imagine. The very short wine list is both interesting and good. We shared three glasses:
2025 Tsivolas Assyrtiko from Limnos - the star
2014 Bhilar Rioja - good, not special
2023 Domaine de la Bastide Cotes du Rhone - fine, especially for the vintage.
A wonderful trip, stalked by rain but through many places long on beauty and short on people.