Venturing Out

Last night, as Russ lay sleeping, I went down an internet rabbit hole thanks to my sister Janet. She sent me the links to about ten cool things to do in Maine. I am not sure how long she has been accumulating this list, as I know she loves nothing more than to travel. Janet obviously curated it for me since most of the places are close. From her list I inquired about a sailboat trip and an oyster class, but in typical Maine laidback was I am yet to hear back.

One place she had on her list was a small cafe in Warren, Me called the Saint George River Cafe. Since Russ and I had already planned to go visit the Sweetgrass Winery in Union we added the cafe to our trip. Shay gets to go with us most places so we decided to go for Bruch close to the opening time so we could be sure to get a table outside.

We meandered up to Warren, a town, and I use the word town loosely, we have never visited. As we descended the road towards the river it was hard to miss the cafe, with the word boldly posted on the side of the building. Out front were at least a dozen large motorcycles. I am certain my sister had no idea she had recommended a biker bar.

Russ and Shay got the table on the deck and I went inside, wearing my white capri pants and blue and white French sailor’s shirt. To say I stood out was an understatement. First I was the only one wearing a color other than black and second I was the only one who had room on both my arms of legs for a large tattoo.

The owner, a small Asian man gestured me in. Turns out this is not normally a biker bar. This group had phoned ahead asking if they could seat them as there was a huge wait at Moody’s diner. The bikers occupied all the tables having loud conversations with many expletives, across all the tables.

I joined the line to place our order with the owners teenaged son, who was more than overwhelmed. I thought I was in the line behind a woman about my age with dry bleached blond hair and a particularly ugly tattoo of a woman. It could have been a great tattoo of an ugly woman, but either way it was unattractive. Before I knew it a very large muscular man in a black wife beater and a half removed tattoo of a woman on his shoulder, along with at least 30 other tattoos, butt in front of me.

As I was clearly outnumbered, and not wanting to get any grease on my white outfit I decided not to make a scene of it. The butter made sure not to make eye contact with me since he knew what he was doing. The man behind me saw this happen and started up a conversation with me. They were a biker group out of Wooster, MA and he told me bikers are good tippers. I don’t know if that was supposed to make up for being line cutters, but he was polite if you ignored the ten or so “fucks” he said in our short conversation.

Eventually I was up to the teenaged son and he gave a big sigh of relief as he asked me for our order. Clearly getting the biker orders right was a stressful job.

After ordering I joined Shay and Russ outside and the one man cook didn’t take forever getting us our food. Despite a very limited menu the food was delicious. Shay especially enjoyed the sausage.

Out visit to Sweetgrass was a very different scene. We had been there before when we used to go to family camp. They not only make wine, but distill spirits as well. Russ was going to try their whiskey. He almost didn’t buy it based on the fact that it was aged in barrels after they had blueberries in them first, but decided to try it as we had made such a big trip to get there.

Sweetgrass is a beautiful setting and they even had a whole area devoted to dogs. Shay and I enjoyed the gardens while we waited for Russ. On our way home we stopped at Beth’s farm market in preparation of our first dinner guest tomorrow. No bikers there either.