Week 1 of USA Trip & The Arrival

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😊 WEEK 1 BLOG WRITTEN UNDER ARRIVAL.........

ARRIVAL

And so after a 7 1/2 hr, quite pleasant flight filled with so so many films, TV shows and games we arrived in Newark Airport, just outside New York. Like any other airport its big and expensive, we walked around for a wee while getting our bearing and trying to find a place to eat that would work with my Dairy Intolorence, most of the places are big fast food, greasy eateries, the people serving in them are quite large people which for me makes it quite funny, its almost an advertisement 'eat here if you want to end up Huge like me', so if you watching your waistband this certainly acts as a great deterrent. We found a place called 'Greenleaf's Grill' at the food court,... wow, yummy scrummy, make superb Houmous & salad Pannini's 😉. So we tried our best to waste the 4 hours or so that we had to wait before our next leg of the journey began, in a propella plane, great unless you were sitting right at the propella's (a meter away from you), kinda freaky but do-able since the flight was only a 1 1/2.....and then we finally arrived, arrived 😊

WEEK 1

So jet lag was cool, only thing I noticed was we'd wake up at 6.30 each and every morning, thankfully I've gained an extra hour now, but still rising too early for my liking. Our first week has been great, every day has been filled with something, the highlights have been playing with and walking Inca, Ian's gorgeous black Lab, learning to Kayak for the first time. Not too shabby I must say, though I find it a little scary when out in open water and its a little choppy, Simon is great though, kayaking is second nature to him and he's brilliant at egging me on when I need the extra push and confidence. Our aim is to Kayak around Orr's Island, should take just over 3 hrs, but its a mainly in open water and is surrounded by lobster pots and therefore lobster boats, so it shall be interesting but hopefully uneventful (I don't really want to capsize).
We've also seen a sum of Brunswick, most of which is just plain weird, the set up is strange, you have one shop then you drive 1/4 mile to the next shop and so forth, its so inefficient, time consuming and unfriendly to the environment its unreal, we really wonder if we will ever get our heads around it. Brunswick does have a main street though and it has 2 of my new favourite shops on it, a gluten free bakery which does thee most amazing dairy free cinnamon muffins and a shop much like the Phoenix in Findhorn or Grassroots in Glasgow, it sells organic locally sourced food which caters for vegans/ vegi's n Dairy free people, plus normal foods, clothes, alcohol and much much more. We also checked out Freeport, I liked the main street there also, much more like the streets back in Europe as well, though i have been told that these main streets in Freeport and Brunswick are not common for America, Americans do quite prefer their gas guzzling inefficient way of life. Anyway Freeport had some cool shops like the 'mangy moose', 'Horny toad' and of course we had to check out The North Face Store and the huge LL Bean store, with the massive boot outside, the store is seriously big, you could get lost in it.
Lobster here in Maine is super cheap, we bought 6 decent size lobsters plus a bag of clams and oysters for $40, but then again it is what Maine famous for. So we had the chance to cook and eat Lobster for the first time, which is delicious!, very messy and strange at first since your pulling apart an actual lobster to get to his meat but really worth it, I'm already looking forward to Claire's family lobster cook out next Saturday. 😊
On Friday we were lucky enough to go on a overnight sailing trip, I loved the sailing, we went out to Jewels Island, went ashore and explored, which was so beautiful, extremely fine weather as well. We enjoyed the sunset and ate BBQ on the boat that evening, the next day we went to Eagle Island where the first guy to go to the North pole lived, that was pretty cool, then we sailed home, Si and I took it in turns, it was sweet, totally loved it, hard, especially when there's a lot of strong wind and your still trying to navigate through the odd lobster pot but so awesome, and its a great workout on the leg muscles 😉, so after a hard day sailing Ian and Claire took us to Cooks Lobster House, yummy food there, definitely worth while checking out, id recommend either the prawns or the steak...mmmmm.
Sunday, Ian and Claire's next door neighbours and very good friends invited us all out for lunch and for a afternoon out on their speed boat, so much fun, certainly different to sailing, gets u there in half the time, shame we didn't get a shot at steering this time, but that was probably a wise move, maybe next time. One thing I will add is ALWAYS carry your ID on you, even if your 35+, when we went for lunch I wasn't allowed any scrumptious wine as I hadn't taken my ID on me, that is a mistake I shall not be repeating, was a shame since it as so warm as well, would have been a perfect cool~me~down, ach well, eh

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