Maine/Vermont Day 3/4: Taco Night!

Camping.  I dropped it like a hot potato when I left Boy Scouts in 1985.  It's not that I hated it, but camping requires a deliberate attention to the little details of life (like where you're gonna poop) that I found increasingly foreign.  I got used to counting on certain things being there (like a bathroom) and using my time to move "forward", I suppose.

Then Amy told me about Taco Night.

Amy has been a camper all her life, never going through a long 30-year drought like I did.  And she told me stories.  When Amy and her late husband Carter and her son Terry went camping, they always designated one night as Taco Night.

And I thought, "That's what's been missing!"  Tacos are just meant for campouts: easy, tasty, yet well-balanced.  They are more forgiving than cobbler or chicken (why they pushed these difficult-to-prepare items at Scout Camp is beyond me.  Might as well do souffle!)  The only thing you can't do is bake the shells, so they quickly crack and split into messy pieces.  But that's what the ground is for.   If there's one thing you've got a lot of on a campout, it's ground!

We set out for Maine on Tuesday.  To ease ourselves into Vacationland, as it is called on the Welcome To Maine sign, we decided to do our first night at Captain Swift's Bed and Breakfast in Camden.  Ok it's not camping, but it's transitional camping.  Camden is a beautiful port town with a wavy, rugged little inset harbor.  It has a town park and a gazebo overlooking everything.  Boats of all kinds of analog and digital varieties dotted the water.

And lobstah!  We hit Cappy's Chowder House for dinner.   Amy asked the waitress whether a whole lobstah was hard-to-eat and distusbing to look at.  She replied, "I'm a vegetarian and I have no problem with it."  Then we saw one delivered to the table next to us.  It was all antenna and feelers and claws, and it was lying on its back with its belly erupting meat.  It was the movie Alien in a plastic basket.  No thanks.  Amy opted for Lobstah Tacos and I for Seafood Chowdah and a Lobstah Slidah.  (They talk funny around heah.)  Tasty!  And it's proof that lobstah is more than a butter-delivery-vehicle.

Ah but Captain Swift's had the best breakfast evah ... I mean ever.  A baked apple with cinnamony crumbly core and drizzled with a little maple syrup.  Then french toast ... but that's like calling Rhapsody in Blue "a ditty."  It was fluffy and swirled on the inside, like a cinnamon roll.  The outside was very crispy, with a struesel topping that quoted the baked apple.  It had no trace of raw egg sogginess, yet it was custardy.  Kind of like good bread pudding, but less heavy.  Three silver-dollar-sized slices of Canadian Bacon with a cube of pineapple on each flanked the dish.  Oh so good!

On Wednesday we headed further up the coast to Eastport, the most Northeastern corner of the United States, and the one the sunrise is supposed to hit first.  From the moment we hit Seaview Campground, we were the bain of the owner's existence.  In early October there were only a couple of occupied RV's left and no tent campers.  We paid for our site and looked around for it ... but with no other campers around for reference points, we couldn't find it.  We drove around for ten minutes, backed into a tree (at 5mph - no injuries!), and the owner came out and yelled "IT'S OVER THERE!" She obviously had went on her own vacation in her mind and we were ruining it.

We set up camp and had half an afternoon to wander, ending up at nearby Shackford Head State Park .. a tiny one, but with a nice nature walk and great views of the bay and Canada.  My cell phone warned me every five seconds of roaming charges - though we were still in the states, the nearest cell tower was in Canada.  All of a sudden we gained an hour of Nova Scotia time which threw my internal clock off.

I tossed my cell phone into the bay.  We were wondering what the large rings in the bay were, finding out later they were Atlantic Salmon beds.  This explains the huge charges I later found on my phone bill.  Evidently they like to talk to their buddies usptream.

And then Taco Night!  It was everything I hoped for, and I devoured half a dozen of those tasty Pockets O' Joy.  At 6:30, night had descended.  We had tried to get firewood early, but the owner had long abandoned her post at the office, so no go.  We climbed into our tent and read our Kindles.  Amy's more modern one had a built-in light, but I needed an LED headlamp to read mine.  I looked like a miner on his lunch break.

We fell asleep to the sound of the foghorn.  Evidently it worked because no boats suddenly appeared in our tent.  For this we are thankful.