East Bound And Downeast

Pushing east to Maine for the Atlantic and the lobster

We arrived at Old Orchard Beach campground and set up camp in twenty minutes. Record time for our hungry crew. A short walk from our site to the lobster shack and another twenty minutes later and those bright red beauties were sitting in front of us. We ooed and ahhed, smiled, fist bumped and then realized that we had a problem. We had no idea how to proceed. “Never ate lobster?” our server said and started to demonstrate. “You just crack this, pull that, twist here. Don’t eat that. Some people eat this but, uhh, I don’t”. The lobster was fantastic. It’s also everywhere. Even the local thai joint was in on the racket offering “lobster pad thai”. I want that. Didn’t get that.

This campground is the exact opposite of the last one. It’s woody and relatively HUGE at 75 acres, packed with hundreds of people, campers, tents, golf carts, bikes, playgrounds, a zip line, a bmx track, arcade, store and so on. We had a nice pull through site right across from the store. Some roads in the campground take you above huge sections of the campground. This provided great views of below and through the trees of the rooftops of campers and streams of smoke from at least fifty or more campfires burning during the day.

With full bellies we hopped on the bikes and muscled our way up and down some hills, past the high ropes course, a couple of blocks through town and parked our bikes at the beach head. The tide was out and after thirty yards or so across the hard packed sand our toes were in the Atlantic. We made it. I was overly excited about this for some reason. I was snapping tons of photos and forcing the family in to failed attempts at artsy compositions. We walked down to the pier for look around and decided that we would be back tomorrow (regardless of the low 70s forecast) to relax on this here beach and enjoy this here coastal town.

Old Orchard Beach

The next fews days were spent at the skatepark, biking, beaching, walking, grilling and relaxing. We had our own lobster feast which seemed to have maxed the boys and Erin out on lobster. Elliott jumped up from the picnic table during our feast and stepped in a pile Mini poop. He won’t be eating lobster for a while. Not me. I love these things. Poop feet be damned! We went to the pier one and night and the boys rode rides and we got some of the famous “pier fries” which were awesome (basically Cobo fries). We drove up to Portland for some errands and I denied Erin’s one day old great wish to see a piece of the Berlin wall while we were. She just informed me that the good news is that there’s a piece of the Berlin wall in every state.

We’re loving Maine. The people, the ocean, the sights. Feels really good here.