Clara's Twin Sister's Birthday

This is jumping ahead a little bit, and I'll try to go back and fill in a little bit later on, but yesterday was such a neat day – 'twas Clara's twin sister's birthday . . . and Clara had promised her twin that she would have TWO lobsters, one for each of them . . . so it was out for lobster that evening . . .

We started the evening with another bottle of champagne from the Pleasant Valley Winery in the NY Finger Lakes region, and then went over to the Thurston Lobster Pound in Bernard, ME just across Bass Harbor from our campground (at SeaWall in Acadia NP). Now, for the uninformed, such as all of us just two days ago, a "Lobster Pound" is a shack, of varying level of funk, where they pull the lobster out of a tank, weigh it (hence apparently the term "pound"), then drop it in a vat to cook, and away you go. The one we went to was refreshingly casual and low key with very pleasant atmosphere and congenial staff. In the last two days we have seen at least a dozen such, apparently unrelated, businesses in just the few miles around the Park area.

In one of these places, we saw a guy devour a three pounder all by himself, but we limited ourselves to the "medium" size, just over a pound and a half (shell and all, so there's perhaps a little over a half pound of actual lobster). What we saw was priced at between $10 and $13 per pound. In another of these places the day before, Clara ordered what the menu called "Lazy Lobster," meaning that it consisted of all the meat from the lobster but already taken out of the shell and served in a butter sauce.