Last day in the States and had to hunt down some BBQ to slake Mr K’s new found appetite for ribs, ribs and more ribs! Can’t blame him though, nearly every place we’ve been to has been excellent for it’s BBQ compared to what passes for American BBQ in Australia (it’s the whole Chinese food thing all over again). We found a Famous Dave’s not far from the Gun Show and sort of near the airport and it seemed like a good place to hole up for a while, and grab a decent meal before being faced with the horrors of 13 hours stuck in a plane and nothing but airline food.
Just getting out of your car near this place makes you salivate, you can smell the smoke and BBQ meats from the car park.. add to that, Happy Hour beers for $1.99 or $2.99 for a pint… and you got a lot of happy campers inside. Not a great photo – but first thing that greets you is a case full of trophies for their award winning meats, and a claim to have the ‘World’s Best Greatest Ribs’… that’s a pretty big call. 🙂
I loved the menu with the picture of a very happy porker, showing both what is inside the piggy as well as the best cuts that come off them.
Apparently this is a chain/franchised restaurant, and the decor kinda reminds you of a Hog’s Breath Cafe (without the over clutter), the red check table cloths, and the faux indoor iron patios make for an interesting ambiance, well as interesting as it gets for a place that uses license plate in their decorating! I thought their ‘Recipe Vault’ was kinda cute though. 🙂
But the decor isn’t really why you turn up – it’s all about the BBQ. We order and appetiser to share – Famous Dave’s taster platter of awesome! It contained, chicken tenders, fried catfish, naked traditional buffalo wings, onion rings and four dipping sauces from blue cheese dip to hot and spicy BBQ sauce. Delicious and plenty to share – this was just an appetiser!
Knowing full well that the appetiser was likely to pretty full on, we decided to share it, and to share a meal as well – can’t imagine how you’d fare if you ordered appetisers and a meal each! This was a 1/3 Rack of St Louis Ribs served with two sides (potato salad and mac ‘n’ cheese), and cornbread. The ribs are served rubbed and there are six different sauces of varying levels of hot, sweet, mild, chipotle etc for you to drown them in. Tasted bloody awesome! 
At the end of our meal, Mr K took the time to compliment the owner/manager and next thing you know we are walking out of there with a bottle of Famous Daves most popular BBQ sauce – the Rich and Sassy, as well as a dozen little taster sachets to take home. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) Mr K had already bought FIVE bottle of various BBQ sauces to bring home as he is intending on becoming a master of the American BBQ. We are very much looking forward to sampling his efforts in the coming months. 🙂
Famous Dave’s was pretty fucking good… if you get the chance, you should check it out, and definitely try the baby back tips. Delicious!
Today we were driving around Maine chaing pretty lighthouses and lobsters – it’s just the done thing up here apparently. Finally the weather turned to be a bit more what we were expecting when we booked for this time of year – nearly 10C and sunny. I can’t get over the snow on the ground everywhere, it hasn’t snowed here for weeks, but there are areas that are shaded that don’t get warm enough to thaw it.
I was very amused to see a Park Ranger adjusting the fire danger sign at a visitors centre off the higway out of Portsmouth… I was looking around at all the snow on the ground, and we are rugged up in jackets and scarves, and it’s the first day we’ve seen the sun in over a week, and here he was setting the fire danger to ‘High’. Seemed absurd, but I guess they know how to read their conditions.
We found the Nubble Light House which was much smaller than I was expecting. Most of the lighthouses I have seen back home are enormous but this was just a cute little lighthouse sticking out on a point.
The sea was something to watch, the colour of the water was spectacular and the surf was really violent. I don’t think you can really capture how aggressively the waves were beating the coastline, and if this is what it looks like on a beautiful calm day, I can imagine it gets pretty scary up here during storm season.
Mr K observed that people must really bloody love their seafood to risk going out in all that to get it. Nubble Beach itself was a littel calmer, and had lots of empty car parks, so we figure it is probably a very popular spot during the warmer months.
Again with the frozen ponds, though I am beginning to wonder if all these ‘ponds’ we are seeing are natural water courses or whether they are spaces where water has run off from melting snow and then refrozen before it’s had a chance to drain away properly!
Went past this quaint little art studio making wind chimes… they were moving a lot in the wind and looked really pretty, but I’m not so sure they are still wind chime if they sound either silent or clunky and terrible when they move are they? They reminded me of that movie ‘Twister’ where they visit the Aunt who makes all the wind ornaments for her garden (which is neither here nor there, but there you have it).
We were winding our way up to Cape Elizabeth which is a particualrly picturesque spot just south of Portland and we are told has amazing views and a lobster shack with lovely seafood. The Cape was really pretty, but again the sea looks cold and hostile. I just could not imagine being out there in that water. :/
We found the Cape Elizabeth Lobster Shack easily enough, it is literally the only business out here on the point. They have an huge outdoor eating area with about 30 picnic benches that were decidedly empty on a day like today. You could tell by their ordering system that they are used to dealing with huge volumes of customers, so it must be a very popular spot. The speciaility of the house is fried clams apparently, so we had to try some of those.
As per usual, one meal like this is way too much food for one person and the fried clams were as good as they are reputed to be. 🙂
After lunch we had to head back to Portsmouth to take care of the dreaded packing… our Qantas flights gave us two pieces of luggage each to a total of some ridiculous amount of kilos that we can check. But on our internal flights with American Airlines we have only one piece each to a maximum of 23 kilos. Which really sucks. It totally puts a dampner on the whole shopping bit, we knew we were going to have this enormous allowance once we get to Vegas, but everything up to that point was “no, we can’t fit it in our luggage”. So lots of lovely things we could have taken home for the neices and nephews stayed where they were on the shelves – which is good for the wallet I guess (See? I am a silver linings sort of gal, after all!) But it did mean I was having to get very creative with our packing to make sure neither bag was over weight and we weren’t carrying too much on in cabin luggage! Packing can be a nightmare, but I have the Packing Gene and no doubt I will have the Tetris theme music stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
Once the packing was mostly sorted we went for another tootle around looking for one last lobster restaurant… back over the Piscataqua River into Maine we went. The bridge crossing over to Kittery is very cool, but hard to take photos of it as you are driving along.
In the end we found ourselves at a place called ‘The Oarhouse‘ (The ‘H’ is silent according to our waiter… though I think he means absent). It was a beautiful little restaurant and we just about had the place to ourselves, though in a few weeks time when the weather has warmed up, it is reservations weeks in advance to get into the place apparently.
The menu was very impressive, and I ordered the scallops wrapped in apple wood smoked bacon, which were wonderfully fresh and delicious.
And then, on John’s recommendation ordered the baked stuffed lobster… which came out looking like this – 
Just how hungry did you think I was John?!? OMG, that lobster was so big, I named him Frank and felt sure that Frank would defeat me. But it turned out, as with all the lobster goodness, it’s 80% presentation, 10% stuffing and about 10% meat! So did my best with Frank and admit, that nearly all the stuffing remained on the plate with a pile of empty shells. So good. Would definitely recommend this place for dinner if anyone is up this way.
And so ends our journey in New England… tomorrow off to Las Vegas where the weather should be a balmy 20-22C. Yay! 😀
On the whole, Boston, we were less than impressed with your horrendously cold and wet weather, putting a crimp in our touristy plans to get out and about and see as much of town as possible. Instead we did a lot of racing between under covered portico to under covered portico with other harried residents decked out in anoraks, wellingtons, scarves, gloves and no doubt thermals under the lot! Damn uncivilized of you, Boston. Mind you the rows and rows of walk up town houses still look kinda cool in the rain…
…the highway as we were heading out of town… not so cool at all! Visibility was low, most people were driving without their headlights on (bloody morons!), and continuing to change lanes without indicating (flamin’ wankers!), and speeding (fuckin’ eejits!). So not fun. Then the pouring rain started making strange noises. Sounded a bit like sand spraying all over the car, and that was when we realized that it was itty bitty frozen rain. 🙁 Not snow, and not big enough to be hail, so I guess it was sleet or some such shit.) Either way very unpleasant and the sound reminded us how cold it was outside… as if the windows fogging up and the seat heaters not cutting the mustard, weren’t already ramming that bit home! 
Other than the ugly weather, driving around New England has been a lot of fun, and I find a sort of poetic irony in having spent the last few weeks engrossed in American history, particularly their struggle for independence from British rule – only to be driving around the countryside to places all named after towns in England. It started with the ‘News…’ New Jersey, New England, New Hampshire, New London, New York ferfucksake! And the further we went the more of it there was – Essex, Salisbury Plymouth, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Georgetown, Manchester, Hampton, Dover, Bangor, Chester and it goes on and on and on. I guess all these places were named before “the Incident”. 🙂
Once the rain stopped we found Portsmouth in New Hampshire was really quite picturesque. There is a river that runs between New Hampshire and Maine, called the Piscataqua River, (I can’t even pronounce that shit) creating an effective state line.
There was a lot of snow lying around in a manner that I found disconcerting – like it was stubbornly refusing to have the decency to melt in a timely fashion.
Now, as anyone I discussed this trip with before we left, y’all know that the sole reason we had for coming up this way was to:
Thanks to Yelp, TripAdvisor and Reddit, we took all the guess work out of choosing good places to check out. First stop was Warren’s Lobster House in Kittery, which is just over the Piscataqua River, placing it just in Maine… a genuine Maine lobster shack right on the water.
The menu was somewhat overwhelming, and evoked way too many questions – what on earth is popcorn lobster? do I want 1 and a 1/5 pound lobster? or 2, 1 pound lobsters? How much meat do you actually get from a boiled lobster anyway? Any why aren’t Americans on board with the fucking metric system yet? In the end, the lovely waitress told us there was about 9 oz (about 180gms) of lobster meat in a 1 1/4 pound lobster, which doesn’t sound like too much, so I opt for something called a Lobster trip to try and get a taste of all the good things – Stuffed lobster tails, steamed lobster claws and popcorn lobster! 
OMG. It was absolutely delicious! Lobstery goodness all round. They gave me a bib and an offer of assistance to help me get into the lobster if I ‘couldn’t figure it out’. Turns out I didn’t need either, all those years of fighting to get meat out of sand crabs and mud crabs totally paid off. 😀
We notice quite a few things driving around New England at the end of March… there’s a lot of stuff that is still “Closed For The Season”, which is a euphemism for “We think it’s too fucking cold and there aren’t enough visitors to open yet”. And ‘the Season’ seems to be really subjective. Some places were opening March 1, some felt the season started March 12 (no idea why), some said April 1, other signs said April 25, and some people we spoke to said, ‘usually after Labour Day’, which is like late May! So everyplace we went to see, it was bit hit and miss as to whether or not it was going to be open – we were mostly lucky but there’s plenty of restaurants, tourist centres and stuff that are all closed.
Another thing that we thought was really odd – people here still have their Christmas decorations up and it is now April. They have their plastic Santas and reindeers on their snow covered lawns, lights strung up on porches and wreaths still hanging on doors! Yeah… I’m usually trying to pack Xmas away the day after Boxing Day, so I am not really understanding this one. 
Still, things are so pretty here, even a frozen pond on a day that is about -3C and raining can still look quite beautiful, so long as you don’t have to get out of the car!
We had a few errands to do this afternoon and Mr K insisted we go into the store called ‘Big Lots!’ With absolutely no idea what they sold big lots of, we found ourselves in the biggest, tackiest, shit for sale you’ve ever seen – also known as a dollar store.
Only thing I saw here that I thought was fun, well funny really, was ‘Hamburger Helper’! I’d heard about it on TV shows and stuff, but never seen it – and to discover that it came in a variety of flavours? Well this was a real revelation! Ahuh, diverse flavours of Hamburger Helper, who’d’ve thunk?
We also went looking for a couple of bottles of Shiraz, the booze here seems to be sold mostly in state run Liquor stores which is odd… but we won’t compain too much as it somehow seems to keep the prices (probably the taxes) down. Aussie wines were cheaper here than they are at home! This 1.75L bottle of Captain Morgans Private Stock was *drumroll please*… USD$32.00! At home you’d pay AUD$90.00 for a 750ml bottle, and that’s if you could find the stuff. I’d probably be a very accomplished alcoholic if I lived here.
In the car park at the shopping centre, both Mr K and I notice at the exact same time that the motto for New Hampshire is “Live Free or Die” which seems a bit extreme nowadays. So we figured it too was a hangover from the struggle for Independence and took it upon ourselves to look it up. Not so, apparently the sentiment was penned by some old General in the Civil War era, but it wasn’t adopted as New Hampshire’s state motto until 1945, and there were Supreme Court rulings made on the displaying of the motto as recently as 1977 (some religious Jehovah Witness dude covered up the ‘or die’ bit on his number plate and ended up in court for defacing a licence plate), so it seems this whole state motto thing isn’t just them paying lip service to long dead ideals – libertarianism might be alive and well in New Hampshire (or free and dead, the jury is out).
We did manage to rug up and go for a bit of a wander around Portsmouth but as I said, there were LOTS of places that were closed, and many more that were bringing in all new stock getting ready for ‘the season, darlings’, but we did stumble on this cool little nautical gift shop called ‘Tugboat Alley’ – Surly would have loved this place, everything boats and knots and all nautical and sailing related are right up his alley. I had to take a pic of the door way with it’s port and starboard lights, we thought it was very cute.
Oh, and I found this pic for The Small Child… kiddo, if you were here, we would have totally taken you to the water park, just ignore all that white crunchy stuff you can see on the ground all around the park, that just softens your landing when you come down the slides!
