Making Our Way Downeast

We still had a few things to do before we left Scarborough, and yes, some involved food:-)  When we lived in NH from 1978-1998, for about 5 years or so, we would rent a beach house on Wells Beach, and most of the time we did we would be joined by family and friends.  We all would share this old decrepit one bathroom house right smack on the beach for two weeks having a ball.  There is a restaurant there called Billy's Chowder House that we would go to often, and sometimes we would even drive over in the middle of winter to have some of their terrific food.  It sits out on a tidal marsh on the land bridge from the mainland to the beach.  After we left NH, on one of our visits back we went again and found it had gone downhill.  We didn't go there again during our couple more visits to the area, but we had heard it had returned to its original glory and we were looking forward to finding out first hand.  So off we launched, and found out they were having $1 oyster day to boot!  So we put in our orders, Tom a dozen, Jan 4, and a dozen for me along with the rest of our orders.  We were hoping for okay oysters, especially for a buck a piece.

THEY WERE AWESOME!

And so was the rest of our meal.

Tom had clam chowder which I was remiss in getting picture of, but reported delicious.

Karen's seafood chowder and haddock bites

Jan's terrific haddock chowder

And my awesome lobster stew, stew that is,
no potatoes, the way it is supposed to be, thin, milky,
buttery scrumptiousness overflowing with lobster

After a delightful meal, Tom and looked at each other and when the waitress asked if we would like dessert, we each ordered another dozen oysters:-)  Wonderful!

So we once again heartily recommend Billy's.  Then we decided to go walk on the beach.  At low tide Wells beach is great, nice and wide with hard pack sand and the ability to walk for miles.  We had timed our visit for low tide, but had not planned for the intense wind so we only walked a mile or so, but we had to go see our old rental house.

Blustery

But beautiful

And our poor old house, but it looks like someone was in the process of redoing it, what a location.

On another day Jan and I wanted to go back to Portsmouth, NH for a few things, to visit an asian market and a farmer's market, and decided to get some more Newick's clam chowder while there, and to our surprise, we found out Karen and Tom on their travels went back to Billy's for another lunch:-)

And this is what clam chowder looks like

Man, do we miss this kind of food, so we are really taking advantage of it in restaurants and markets.  We are happy, happy.

Jan and I even went back and walked Wells Beach again.

But now with Memorial Day weekend arriving it was time for us to go downeast.  So off to Boothbay, and across the bridge in Bath with the shipyard fairly quiet.

We pulled into our campground, Shore Hills, a nice place, and were surprised and still are surprised that they are not full.  We are wondering if the high fuel prices are taking their toll?  Normally here in New England the start of the season, Memorial Day and the finish, Labor Day are usually standing room only.

Us in front, Karen and Tom behind

The campground borders a tidal flat if you are willing to walk down a big hill to get there, and a mountain to get back:-)

All of us are having fun, including Karen and Tom's dog, Sophia.

The first day of the weekend was gloomy, rainy, cool, and foggy, but still beautiful.

One of our goals, a must do in fact, is to go to famous Red's Eats in Wiscasset, just down the road, for one of their gigantic lobster rolls, but we wanted to wait until after the weekend to do it with the big lines.  There will be more on that later, but in the meantime there is another lobster shack across the street that gets almost as glowing reviews and has much shorter lines, we had never visited Sprague's lobster before and we all decided it would be a good idea to check it out.  We did and we all were quite impressed.  Nice friendly place, and the lobster rolls were great!

A very respectable and delicious lobster roll!

More to come.