A few of my friends went up to the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland last year. I was bummed that I couldn’t go, so this year I was not going to miss it! My parents happened to be planning a visit to Boston the same weekend, so we all went on a little field trip to Maine.
I had also never been to Portland so we stayed there for a night on the way up to Rockland. In Portland we went to Blue Spoon for dinner, a tiny restaurant in Munjoy Hill, which was a remarkably non-touristy area of the city. We tried some Maine beer (Geary’s, Maine Beer Company) and I had the Casco Bay mussels. After dinner we toured around a bit and we got to see the stages being set up for the Mumford and Sons concert that was happening on the East Promenade the next day. Now we understood why it was so hard to get a hotel reservation in Portland for that weekend!
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| We missed Wine Time… |
Saturday morning we drove up to Rockland to experience the Lobster Festival. This is listed in the book “1,000 Things to Do Before You Die”…great, only 999 things left to do! Well I haven’t actually read the book, so hopefully I’ve unknowingly knocked some other things off the list already.
We arrived in town just in time for the parade, but we decided to skip it and head into the festival, which was great timing because the lobster tent opened shortly after we got there. We had our first lobster probably around 11 AM. I went for the twin lobster dinner, which was a better deal at $17 than the single lobster dinner that cost $12. These were soft shell lobsters so no crackers required. Delicious.
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| Twin lobster dinner |
After our lobster dinner, we walked around a bit and got to observe the lobster cooking process. They have a lobster cooker that can cook 1,300 pounds of lobster at a time. Each “container” holds about 80 pounds and takes 13 minutes. That’s a whole lot of lobster!
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| Lobster assembly line |
We also walked around the town of Rockland for a little while, then finished up with a lobster roll before hitting the road back to Boston.
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| No work required to eat |
The rundown:
Blue Spoon
89 Congress Street, Portland
Maine Lobster Festival
Rockland
Kara Cooks and Eats 