Day 5 of Maine 2009.

Its a Monday and we have to leave. How typical of a Monday to be a let down. But our flight wasn't until 4, so we had until 2 or so to go out and do stuff. Not a total loss.

Had breakfast, took about an hour to pack all our fragile (italian) stuff, then checked out of the b&b. Spent a little while talking with David, the owner, about Portland and Maine in general. He was very friendly and a great host while we were there. I'll be emailing him today to get a custard recipie from him.

We decided we would head up towards Freeport to visit the Cold River Vodka distillery. Unfortunately, we thought it opened at 11 and it really opened at 12. So we went into Freeport and had lunch at a place called Azure. Pretty good stuff. Ejdo had fish and chips and I had a grilled portabella salad.

Still had a few minutes to spare, so we followed the signs to the "Big Indian". We knew we had arrived when we saw a big indian. For no apparent reason. On the side of the road in front of a restaurant that had nothing to do with indians. But hey, its a big indian, gotta take a picture.



After visiting the indian, it was time to go to the distillery. We had a private tour from one of the distillers, and it was pretty cool. Cold River makes potato vodka, which is a little different tasting and distilling process than a grain vodka. It was neat to see all the tanks and hear about the process. They make vodka the same way as its done in Russia and Poland and are the only distillery in the US that does it that way. Got to taste the original and blueberry flavors. The blueberry was really intersting. They just filter the vodka through macerated blueberries and it picks up the sugar and flavors that way. Cool stuff.



At this point we were kinda stuck. We had to be at the airport (20 min away) in an hour. We didn't want to go back and walk around Freeport again. Didn't really want to go to the touristy part of Portland. Not enough time to do much of anything. So we drove out to the other state park near Freeport, just to take a look at it.

Sadly we didn't have enough time to go hike anywhere, but they had a huge trail system there. Seems like it gets a lot of use, as there were probably 10 or so cars on a Monday afternoon. They take care of the trails too. It had rained earlier and they closed the trails to bikes because of it. I did get to snap this picture of one of their signs. Its not every park that has to have a winter and summer yield pattern for trail use. Kinda cool.



All that was left was driving back to the airport and dropping off the car. We had some beers in the Shipyard restaurant in the airport and had an uneventful flight back. Sawyer was conflicted when we got to S&J's house, because he had just been given a pig ear. But he showed how much he loves us by leaving it (for a minute or so) and running to us.

We had an awesome trip. It was mentioned that since we went away for 5 days for our 5 year anniversary, we need to do 10 for 10, and so on. Could get difficult, but could be quite fun. Maine was pretty awesome, but I think if we were there any longer we would have had to start travelling a lot farther to do stuff. We pretty much maxed out on Freeport and Portland. It was definitely an interesting trip though. Thanks Maine!