Last Maine notes

* Why is it that business owners in small touristy towns insist on using puns to name their shops? Is this cuteness supposed to convince us to drop $35 on a tchotchke we don’t need? In Bar Harbor you could buy timepieces at Get Clocked, dog toys at Bark Harbor, and barbecue at Mainely Meat. Now, this is a town with two year-round Christmas shops and a plethora of stores selling goods involving blueberries, lobsters, and moose, so I’m not surprised. But I am amused.

* The area also had an alarming number of huge stores selling solely cupolas and weathervanes. Perhaps there is a greater need for these items in a region so dependent on the weather outlook, but really, wouldn’t one store be enough? How often does one need to purchase a new copper rooster that twists with the wind? Fairly often, apparently.

* Terms I learned in Maine:
Down East. Seeing as how I was as far up the coast as I’d ever been, I was perplexed to see the term “Down East” everywhere. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that it refers to the northern coast of Maine and comes from shipping days, when boats from Boston headed downwind to get to Maine, hence Down East.

Lobster pound. The road out to Mount Desert Island (on which Bar Harbor and Acadia are found) was lined with seafood restaurants called lobster pound – pretty much what anywhere else would be a crab shack, but here you can buy lobsters by the pound to eat there or take home. No word on if the lobsters that aren’t adopted get put down.

* Incidentally, the Desert in the island name is pronounced like “dessert,” which stumped me until I saw that the island was originally dubbed Isles des Monts Desert by Samuel Champlain, a French guy, because the hills were bare. En Francais, you’d stress the second syllable, and that must have been retained after the name was anglicized.