Hi There World!! Its us, Pancake and Flapjack!

Bean Suppah!

Bean suppers. Or as they say here, bean suppahs. They're a big deal here in Maine. Like many other Maine-related activities, I had heard tales of these suppers over the years. The choosing of your pie before you eat dinner, the old people who consume amazing quantities of food in record time, the red hot dogs. Luckily, we arrived in Maine at the tail end of Supper Season. Saturday night John, Jason, and I headed up to Gray to the VFW for $7 worth of beany goodness!!

First up, the pie table. Better hurry! The chocolate creams are going fast.....

We went for an assortment, usually the best tactic.

We grabbed a seat.....away from these people. They were already eating and we didn't want to get in the way of their action. That's a bad move at a bean supper.

We started off by drinking coffee while waiting for our food to come out. And yes, there was also the choice of Kool-Aid. Red Kool-Aid. French bread, coleslaw, and pickles took the edge off. Then came John's personal favorite, American Chop Suey. People, I don't make this stuff up.

Red hot dogs are a Maine favorite. Rarely seen outside the state. There may be a reason for that. They snap when they're cooked right. Explain the physics behind that please.

And finally the star of the show....the beans!! Tonight featured 2 kinds of baked beans, but this number can vary from supper to supper.

Does that look like a well-rounded meal or what?? Oh wait!! The brown bread in a can is coming out. I would have been quite sad if this hadn't shown up.

Mmmmmmm....that's better. We stuffed ourselves on the Maine goodness of it all. Someone in our party may or may not have made a second trip to the pie table -- total bean supper FAUX PAS!!

Said person may or may not have gotten dirty looks.....but turns out that old people eating beans are easily distractible. In any case, we were happy.

Although supper season is starting to wind down around these parts, you can still spot a few signs out on the weekend for bean suppers, turkey suppers, chicken pot pie suppers, even an occasional roast beef supper. Maine is supper-crazy. And this California girl's stomach appreciates that.

Our 1st Day.....in which Sarah learns about the wild & woolly ways of Maine.....

Before I tell you about our first full day here in Maine, I need to introduce you to Creepy Uncle Lance (and yes, we call him that to his face). If you look in the dictionary under "Mainer" you will see a picture of him. Native of the state, French-Canadian by ancestry, all-around crazy. He is married to my mother-in-law's sister and lives across the street from us. Here is a visual:

Back to the story. For some insane reason we woke up at the crack of dawn our first day here. It happened to be the first day of deer hunting season, and most of the neighborhood men were already out in their tree stands. John (Jason's dad) was out hunting with Charlie (who deserves a post of his own), Mary (his mom) was still sleeping, and we were enjoying a cup of coffee. Actually we weren't enjoying it because it was crappy boiled coffee full of grounds....but that is a story for later. Suddenly Lance busts in the door (yelling "knock-knock" as he always does) and says he needs Mary. He says he just shot 2 deer (ummm.....isn't there a limit??) and needs Mary to come out in the woods and gut them for him. Mary is not an early riser. At all. Yet she excitedly popped out of bed, threw on some flannel PJ pants and a blaze orange jacket and sped off on the 4-wheeler.

Less than an hour later, she was back. Covered in blood and triumphant. Now, since these deer came to an untimely end in a rather questionable fashion.....Lance couldn't just take them to a butcher. So they got strung up in his basement......and I asked: Lance, do you know how to butcher a deer? To which he replied, not really. I asked, What are you going to do, Google how to do it? I should have known better.....as he pointed me to a multi-page computer printout. Yes, yes he did Google it. See him in action HERE.

And so the next evening, with a wonderful fall chill in the air, we feasted on fresh venison:

No Jason, we don't eat the hooves. We're civilized. We have our deer with salad and beer:

The aroma of danger made it all the more tasty. Apparently one of the deer had a very identifying scar on it's side.....someone confirmed that a little neighborhood girl had been feeding a deer all summer in her backyard....with that same scar on his side. So thank you little girl, you fattened him up nicely. It was a wonderful welcome to Maine.

Okay already, I'll do it....

Hi there!  So we've been settled in two weeks almost in Maine and I felt it was about time to let you know how its all going!  


First, if you didn't know, we've made the move from Sacramento to Windham!  After an AGONIZING three months working on selling our house, we finally got to pose with the SOLD sign!

We left immediately after the movers were finished.  We locked up, handed the keys to our Realtor, took one last look at our little casa and set off due East!  (After being assured that the cats were situated....)

We didn't leave until about 1:30 or so, despite the fact that our movers shucked and jived like mad men to get us out of there earlier.  They were incredible, but we just had too much crap!

We boogied on down the road, thinking how weird it was that we weren't going BACK that way ever again!  *sniff*  We crested Donner Summit and continued on up to Reno (recent site of my bocci ball debacle) We managed to make it to the NV/UT border that night were me, Sarah, Orono and Willard settled into our first of a series of nice little hotels.  

Utah was pretty flat.  Pretty boring.  It started snowing in Salt Lake, but nothing too bad.  A nice change from the 80 degrees we left back in the Valley though.  The salt flats were pretty cool.  If we'd had the time and no cats, we could have taken the Subaru for a test drive.               .                                                                                       We made good time the next day and as we climbed up through the Rockies we were running from a nasty storm that was brewing behind us and moving south and eastwards.  The idea of staying in Nebraska was killing me, but we pushed out to North Platte, just in time to miss out on several feet of highway closing snow!! EEK!  Sarah drove through a little bit of it, but THAT was way too scary for me, thank you very much....

After safely traversing the wintry Wyoming mountains and surviving our first night in NB without being eaten by the Children of the Corn, we started our journey through middle, or "REAL", America.  We soon noticed this chain of family friendly, morally upright gas stations...

The remainder of the trip was really pretty uneventful.... oh, except for the part where our poor kitty whizzed all over himself in his crate.  You don't know miserable until you've seen a freshly shampooed cat in a cold hotel room.  He was made less miserable by the hot towels I made him.  I wrapped him up like a little burrito and he passed right out... Poor gato.

 We made good time through the rest of the country, enjoying the late fall color and the incredible rest stops.  Do you know that other states have free Wi-fi at their rest stops???  Awesome.  

Finally we made it HOME!!  To Maine!!  Wohoo!!!

Stay tuned for for Sarah's tale of the very first morning in Maine.... 

TESTING

This is a test post. If it was a real post I might have something interesting to say. Then again, maybe not.