While Greg slept off his scolding, I slipped out of the hotel for an early breakfast. I had heard from the Boston friends we met at the Black Trumpet Bistro that the place to go was the Friendly Toast.
Apparently, a lot of other people agree! Luckily, I got there before the lines. My breakfast and the interior, after the jump.
Is it ever really a good idea to have a nightcap at your hotel bar? I question the intelligence of this, but the fact is, we went ahead, and we ended up with some good material.
So here we are, enjoying our bourbon. The band is playing.
Yes, that’s a woman singing and playing drums. Her only other accompaniment was a keyboard player. When we walked into the hotel lobby, we thought, Oh boy. This is the stuff that Saturday Night Live skits are made out of.
And then we were enjoying our drinks for a while, and you know what? We realized the band was pretty good. (Or was that the bourbon talking?) Anyway, you can judge for yourself, in this little clip I like to call “Greg Gets a Scolding.”
We chose the Black Trumpet Bistro for dinner because the chef-owner cooks with local — sometimes even foraged — ingredients, and we wanted to taste New England. Plus, there’s a wine bar.
We only had a few hours in Portsmouth before sunset, but it was plenty of time to take in the brick sidewalks, tall steeples, quaint alleyways and of course, the stunning views of the harbor.
We packed up the car, loaded the bikes and got on the road. Like the dorks that we are, we even had a cooler for drinks and snacks on the road. Thank goodness, because we wouldn’t want to ignore the sage advice of the government in Maine:
There are many funny (cars loaded with bikes and kayaks) and beautiful (waves crashing along a rocky coastline) things to see in Maine, but this sign may have been one of my favorites. We came across it at the first rest stop across the border, where there were only restrooms and a room of vending machines full of chips and sodas. Hence, the warning, I suppose.
After the jump, the SCFmobile, loaded with bikes, but no kayaks, and a few photos of dorks eating their lunch at picnic tables on the side of interstate highways. This is going to be fun, people!
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