Happy birthday to me

Spent a nice day with my sweetie doing a little sightseeing, checking another park off our State Park Passport and getting beat at putt putt golf (by just one stroke).  Now watching some Nascar and relaxing.  Hope you have a great August 18 also and enjoy the pictures.

Old Fort Halifax in Winslow

Bridge plate and look at the Sebasticook River as it meets the Kennebec River

Train tressel across the Sebasticook

Fort Halifax from the train tressel

Across the Kennebec to the old Hathaway shirt factory

Closer shot with the Waterville/Winslow bridge on the right.  Can also see the rapids and another train tressel

Bangor and Augusta

This is really just a place to share some photos but to also share a little love for the 3rd and 4th biggest (using that term loosely) cities in Maine.  So just a little background:  After coming back from our great weekend in Providence, Shel and I wanted to go out to a nice restaurant in Bangor and WE FOUND ONE, a New American Cuisine place on lower Hammond Street called Fiddleheads.  You may have seen my shares on FB and Foursquare, so I won't repeat it but the food was first rate, as good as found in a much bigger city; and the staff was wonderful.
Before our reservations we took a couple hours to walk Downtown Bangor, which I'm quite familiar with having worked there a lot but Shel had not really been.

Hannibal Hamlin statue

Public Enemy #1

I don't have any so-called skyline pictures but I did notice on Friday coming back home from Surry, driving up 1A and then 395, crossing the bridge on 395 between Brewer and Bangor that if you could get up there, you could get an awesome picture of the Penobscot River in front of the Bangor skyline.  There's got to be another place.  That would be a great panorama picture, which will be my segue to share yesterday's time in Downtown Augusta.
Yesterday we went to dinner at the Riverfront BBQ in Augusta, which has a great bar upstairs called the Gin Mill.  We ate upstairs, had a drink with the owner and enjoyed ourselves immensely.  Before we got to the restaurant I took a few pics of downtown, two of them with my new panorama app, which will explain the awkward nature of those pics.

Key Bank bldg. from one block above Water St

Kennebec River bridge from downtown

Old Federal building

There's a block of downtown behind this picture.  That's the Key Bank building again on the distant left and there's another half dozen blocks of downtown beyond.  The entrance to the restaurant is that glass area that goes all the way to the sidewalk in the left foreground.  A great spot for a skyline shot of Augusta would be from that bridge and that one, unlike 395, has a sidewalk.  Hmmmm.

PS  I actually took a picture yesterday from that 395 bridge over the Penobscot River between Bangor and Brewer looking toward the Bangor skyline but it didn't come out well.  Maybe because I was driving (shhhh), maybe because downtown is at least a half mile from this bridge and also due in part because of Todd's nose smudges on the passenger window.  I'll try again.  It would make a nice picture if it could be gotten.

Texas with the boys

As many of you know, a very good friend and his family moved from NH to TX a year ago.  This late winter he sent an email to four of us asking that since the Red Sox would be in Arlington the first weekend in May, how would we feel about coming down for that weekend.  All four of us immediately said we were in.
There's a fair bit to tell but I don't want to bore y'all, so I'll try to summarize the highlights as briefly as possible.  I need to start out by telling you that I personally had not flown since returning home from SoCal in 1988, partly due to my love of roadtrips and in equal measure since they banned smoking on airplanes but I wasn't going to miss this get-together and I couldn't roadtrip it with my limited time off in my "new" job.  It's not that you have to go without a smoke for a 5 hour trip; it's that you need to add in the time to get through security before boarding and add in the layover since the vast majority of airports these days don't have a smoking area.  So Ell and I get to Portland on time, get through security pretty smoothly (though he forgot he had a saline bottle in his bag LOL) and were off to wait to board the flight to Chicago.  Well, we noticed one big band of nasty weather in the Midwest and soon heard that our flight was delayed, followed shortly by the announcement that we wouldn't make our connecting flight in Chicago to Dallas (nice way to help the smoker deal with his addiction!)  So we got on the plane and were told they'd take our info and get us rerouted.  When we landed in Chicago (a nonsmoking airport), folks lined up to try to get info about our leg to Dallas but we noticed that the screens were saying that flight hadn't left yet and we had plenty of time to get on it.  So we made the decision to hustle way over to where that flight was board and made it in plenty of time.  Luckily for us they had never taken us off that flight.  End of airport and smoking stories...suffice to say I'm proud of how well I handled it.
We arrived in Dallas around the same time that TJS did and soon found AA and my brother who were there to pick us up.  We proceeded to Ranch AA, after a short stop at Tom Thumb for critical supplies, where we commenced to catch up, drink and eat lots of cow and pig.  AA grilled us some awesome burgers for a late lunch and we then awaited the brisket and pulled pork he'd been smoking all day.  Man, was it worth the wait.  Forgot to mention that we flew on Friday and the game was scheduled for Saturday night.
Saturday we had a relaxing morning and then struck out for Grapevine to eat some real Texas chili at a place AA was familiar with (hopefully the name will come to me as I write.)  Grapevine is a tourist town, for lack of a better description, a town that's maintained it's old Texas downtown look and is littered with little artist shops and restaurants.  Stevie Ray Vaughn played at the chili place when he was still a teen.  I can't begin to tell you how good that chili was.  "Real Texas chili" doesn't have any tomato base or beans, though beans are an option.  It's just meat and spices.  Good time to share a few pics I took in Grapevine.  Tolbert's!

TJS searching for espresso

The next leg of our journey was on to the ballgame, Red Sox at Rangers at the Ballpark in Arlington.  I've already written about that on BoSox Tavern.  So I won't bore you with that again.  If you haven't read that, you go do so through this link where you'll find a write-up and pictures.  What you won't see in that piece is that after watching the Bruins/Leafs game on the DVR and all the sissies had gone to bed, AA and I stayed up all night drinking, talking movies and watching "Django Unchained," which I enjoyed more than I thought I would.
Now on to Sunday, our last day there since we were all flying out Monday morning.  Our tee times at Champions Golf Club in Justin were for 9:00, which came really early for yours truly who got only a little over an hours sleep thanks to the above-mentioned night in AA's House of Pain.  I had been dreading the golf to some extent because I don't play nearly often enough to play well enough to enjoy it.  Well, I'm very glad I went.  The course was pretty forgiving and I played well enough to have a very good time.  Bro, myself and Ell played in a threesome and TJS and AA played with a couple of AA's new friends in a foursome right behind us.  I'd share my scorecard but I didn't play THAT well.  After an adult beverage at the 19th hole, we went back to AA's to relax for a bit before we struck out on the final leg of an awesome weekend.
We had reservations for 6:00 at the famous H3 Ranch Steakhouse in the old Stockyard area of Fort Worth but we left early enough to look around the stockyard area and have a drink at the historic White Elephant Saloon, where I took a picture and bought a cool-looking t-shirt.  I'll let you decide whether to click the links to learn more about these cool places.

But it's the first time I've smoked inside a public place in many years -- had to have one just for old time's sake -- and we learned about the history of the saloon and took in lots of eye candy.  Then it was on to H3, where we actually ended up eating in the saloon side called Booger Red's, where you'll see a much better picture of the place than the one I took.  At the link you can better see the critters on the wall.  I'll tell you, we ate lots and lots of cow at H3, yours truly and one other having rib-eye and the others porterhouse.  Throw on top of that a couple of awesome appetizers and goblets of grog and we left well satiated.

With full bellies and having run almost nonstop for 3 days, we were mostly too pooped to do much more than go back to AA's, get to bed and get up early to catch our flights out.  I can tell you that we'll have to do this again real soon...maybe Bruins at Stars this time? 

Providence, RI

We had been talking for awhile about doing a get-away weekend in Providence, a city I'd always heard about for its history and more lately its food but I'd never been (went to a ballgame in Pawtucket, which is very close).  So when I heard the NCAA hockey regionals were going to be played there (another bucket list item), it seemed the perfect time to go.

We had a fabulous but way too short weekend there, which really amounted to about 24 hours.  We walked around the city, which is small enough to easily walk around in three spurts over a 24 hour period.  Like some other cities, Providence has some painted lines on the sidewalks that related to different trails of interest throughout the city.  We walked a good bit of the Green Line, which gets you around to see many of the historical sites in the city.

The one thing we missed was being able to take a gondola ride (how romantic!) down the canal.  It doesn't start running each year until the end of April, first of May.  The weather was good enough Saturday (in the 50s) to have been comfortable on a gondola ride.

But the food (AWWW THE FOOD!) was the big story:  The first place we stopped at was a place called Luxe Burger, where you can build you own.  I was tempted to try to beat their challenge and earn a T-shirt (look at the picture below) but we had a nice dinner planned for the evening and I wouldn't be able to enjoy it.  Around 4:00 we decided to go downstairs in the Biltmore (we stayed at the famous old Biltmore) where there was a nice seafood restaurant with a bar to have a cocktail.  We ended up have Happy Hour appetizers -- I had mussels.  Then we had a 7:00 reservation at a "new American" restaurant called Local 121, an upscale modern restaurant that uses all local ingredients.  I would love to describe my meal but my entrée was a special that is not on the online menu and I can't remember the ingredients...suffice to say it had a few I'd never heard of.  It was a porkchop (seems ridiculous to call it a porkchop) and it was devine, as was my bacon wrapped scallop appetizer.  Shelly hopefully will describe her meal in the comments but I will include the restaurant links.
Finally, still being full in the morning, we didn't eat until brunchtime and we decided to go to a chain finally, one I'd never been to, The Cheesecake Factory.  I was very impressed with my meal, an appetizer of Vietnamese tacos and a Navajo sandwich.  Bought two slices of cheesecake as we left;  one for more darling daughter, Kim, who dogwatched Todd while we were gone.  She told me hers was yummy, a vanilla bean slice and mine is still sitting in the frig.

Then there was the NCAA Northeast Regional game last night.  You can read about that at BoSox Tavern.  Enjoy the pics below:

Out our hotel window at the neat old roof of City Hall

My darling, then the canal and then the Capitol

County Courthouse

The very first Baptist Church in the US

Across yet another canal at a neat building but I forgot what it is

City Hall with the Biltmore behind

Thought this was a neat shot down the canal of that bridge with windmills

From Luxe Burger...maybe next time but my Kobe beef bacon cheeseburger was excellent

State Capitol building