New2Maine.com

She and I are finally back from our 1300 mile journey to see family and friends for the holidays. We’re tired, the car is tired, and we’re glad to be home, but it was great to see everyone. We’re getting ready to have friends over for some football, some food, and some celebrating of the coming year, so I just wanted to write a quick post to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I’ll have some more time to post tomorrow, especially with yet another snow storm on its way. There was a good deal of melting while we were gone, but we got 8″ or so after we got back last night, and another good-sized storm is on its heals. Good thing I picked up a new shovel last week!

She and I have birthdays a day apart. I turn “just shy of 30″ today, and she turns “I’ve still got some time until I hit 30″ tomorrow. As our birthday gifts to each other, we’ve reservations at Fore Street for dinner tonight. This is one of the more difficult restaurants in Portland to get a table (unless you go as a walk-in at 5:00 and are ready to wait for several hours), and we’re excited. In 2002, Fore Street was named Number 16 in Gourmet Magazine’s Top Fifty Restaurants of the United States. In 2004, Chef-partner Sam Hayward was named Best Chef: Northeast by the James Beard Foundation, so expectations are high.

We’ve eaten at one of its sister restaurants, Street & Co., and were quite happy with the experience. There is no set menu, as the chef’s choose the best ingredients available on a given day to create the dinners for the evening, so we’re not really sure what to expect. Everything we’ve heard has been positiv, so we’re looking forward to it. You can be sure I’ll share our impressions in an upcoming post.

Loyal reader SteveG wrote in the other day asking if everything was alright. It seems my three week hiatus from posting here hasn’t gone completely unnoticed. That’s a good thing, right? So anyway, yes, She and I are still alive and kicking. We’ve been pretty busy too–we’ve experienced a few new restaurants, took in a Pirates hockey game, and saw Ellis Marsallis in concert, among other things.

Unfortunately, posting about these things hasn’t been a top priority for me. I’ve been contemplating overhauling this site and re-imagining it as more of a Maine-related portal, but I’m backing off from those plans for now. To that end it’s time I started posting some more. I’m thinking a goal of at least two posts a week until Christmas (when She and I will travel back to NY and CT to see family and friends) ought to be a good one to aim for. And no, I’m not counting this as one of the two for this week.

When I checked my email before bed last night, I was excited to see that one of my photos (shown below) had been selected for the short list to make the 3rd edition of the Schmap Guide to Portland. I’d never heard of Schmap before, so I started doing a little digging.

Looking at their homepage (www.schmap.com), I noticed that most of their travel guides seemed to be for cities a good bit bigger than Portland, ME. I took a look at the photo submission page that I was given, and the guide that it was intended to be part of. Sure enough, I saw things about Mt. Hood and saw Vancouver, WA on the map just above Portland. As I suspected, Schmap does not offer a guide to my new home town but rather that larger and more well-known Portland on the west coast. And thus, my excitement evaporated into disappointment…

So my hotel in Kentucky charged a ridiculous $9.99 per day for internet access. Needless to say, I didn’t agree to those charges, and so I didn’t do any writing from Louisville. Of course, when I got my bill, I saw that they’d removed the charge for the one day I did agree to because I was staying on a corporate rate. D’oh. I should have asked about that before assuming I’d have to pay.

Anyway, I arrived back in Portland from the extreme heat of Louisville and was granted by some splendid fall weather. Saturday and Sunday were both in the mid sixties and sunny during the day. You couldn’t ask for nicer weather in October. Unfortunately, today has been cold (52° for a high) and drizzly. In fact, we finally gave in and switched on the heat this afternoon. It’s only set to 70°, and we’ll probably not go higher than that this winter, but it does feel a little like weakness to turn it on so early in the season. I guess that’s fall in Maine though.

I’ll still take this over Louisville. Smelling the salt air when I got off the plane was such a wonderful tonic. Coastal living is simply wonderful. She and I are still so happy we decided to take the plunge and head up here.