Day 4: Vermont/Maine

Before leaving Vermont, we headed to the Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream Factory in Bennington, Vermont. This was an interesting tour; the best parts were the free ice cream samples (some sort of delicious caramel concoction) and a visit to the ice cream graveyard, an actual graveyard with tombstones for various discontinued flavors of ice cream (i.e. sweet potato pie, which sounds pretty gross, but you'll hear more about bizarre ice cream flavors in my Day 5 entry). We then got on the road for a very lengthy journey to Maine, mostly taken on 2 lane roads through small towns with McDonalds that did NOT offer the mythical lobster rolls we'd heard about. For some reason, being forsaken by Mickey D's seems to be a recurring theme of our journey.

Once we got to Maine, we stopped in Bangor (insert the "I hardly know her!" joke here) to find Stephen King's house. After some wrong turns, we finally found it: a beautiful red house with a very creepy wrought iron fence with spider webs built into it. Appropriately, there were also some spooky black birds in front of the house. However, as Brian noted, Mr. King's Prius parked in the driveway made things seem a little less macabre. Going green and being scary just don't go hand in hand.

Eventually we arrived at our motel in Bar Harbor and asked our proprietor the million dollar question: "Where can you get the best lobster roll in Bar Harbor?" We were quickly directed to a downtown restaurant called Testa's that was not only within walking distance from our motel (I love the Anchorage Motel for both its proximity to town and the giant anchor outside that I forgot to take pictures with), but also gave a 20% discount to residents of our motel. We laced up our boat shoes and headed downtown.

Downtown Bar Harbor (or "Baa Haabaah," as we liked to call it), is a mecca of gift shops, restaurants, bars (it's called Bar Harbor for a reason), and a place called the "Hemporium" (which might explain the suspiciously herbal smell that permeated through the town on occasion). We headed to dinner at Testa's and soon bit into our first lobster rolls. Lobster rolls are basically lobster salad with lettuce on buns, and may be the most delicious thing I've ever eaten. Remember the episode of "Peewee's Playhouse" where Peewee loved fruit salad so much that he married it? I'm about to head to the altar with a lobster roll in hand.

Post dinner we did a little shopping and a lot of bar hopping, purposely heading to the bars that looked less crowded after our first experience with a spot called Carmen Verandah's that promised to have a DJ spinning soon proved a little too meat markety for our tastes (note: the DJ was NOT named DJ Chicken Nugget, like the DJ that was advertised earlier on the radio that day. If it had been, we would have stayed). Our final bar of the night was a small place called The Green Room, where the bartender made friends with us before kicking us out (apparently that was not a late night spot). The bartender, upon hearing of our travels to Bangor, informed us that Stephen King had been his baseball coach when he was a kid. Next up: Bar Harbor, Day 2.