Facebook is a wonderful way to extend your Down East experience and keep in touch with Maine. Daily we post beautiful images, local stories, history, events, thoughts, and more.

November 3 at 10 on the Travel Channel, Food Wars comes to Maine. This summer I traveled down to Kennebunkport to be a judge for the episode airing tonight. It was an extremely tough battle between Alisson’s Restaurant and The Clam Shack. Both lobster rolls were totally delicious! But they were also very different. In my three years as Food Editor at Down East, I’ll admit I’ve tried my fair share of lobster rolls. (It’s a tough job, what can I say!) The rolls in this competition were definitely two of the best in the state. But I’ve also learned that the lobster roll is a very personal thing — some people are fervently for mayonnaise. Others call themselves purists and prefer only melted butter. For some, claw meat reigns supreme. For others it’s all about the tail. You’ll have to tune in at 10 tonight to find out who wins this epic battle!

On Sunday, October 10 (10/10/10), I attended the TEDxDirigo event at the Frontier Cafe in Brunswick.  It was intense and overwhelming in the best possible way.  I left inspired personally and inspired about Maine and everything that is going on here.  For a list of the speakers you can check out the TEDxDirigo website, and soon they'll post the talks as well and you can watch them.  And I encourage you to.  Because they are about Maine, and the future, and creativity, and inspiration, and technology.

And if you are not familiar with the TED lectures, do yourself a favor and go to their website to take in some of the great talks they have posted.  The likes of Malcolm Gladwell and JK Rowling, as well as leaders in tech, dance, music - you name it.
 

So the talks were great, the Frontier Cafe was the perfect venue, and the food was top-notch as well.  Dolcelinos was there to offer us ice cream sandwiches at lunch and the Gelato Fiasco provided amazingly delicious ice cream after dinner.

Once my daughter announced that she wanted to make a fairy house, I went to the best source I had. No, not Alan Lee and Brian Froud’s classic tome Faeries, but Down East’s own Fairy Houses of the Maine Coast. Next a suitable grove in a wood where Yeats might have taken a nap was located. Moose Point State Park in Searsport was chosen since it wasn’t too far away and it already had the hundred-year-old Big Spruce that any woodland denizen would be proud to call home.

Once there my family and I scoured, scavenged, rummaged, hunted, and rifled like mudlarks until a heap of stones, windfall berries, moss, ferns, driftwood, fungi, birch bark, and other woodland scraps awaited our nimble fingers.
 

Finding the appropriate fairy grove, though, was no picnic. It took a lot of traipsing about, backtracking, scouting, and Aragorn skills to finally uncover a hidden-away spot far enough away from the beaten path but not too far away that mortal eyes wouldn’t encounter the secret dwellings.

The summer clambake has always been a tradition in my family. Growing up on Cousins Island in Yarmouth, I don’t remember a summer season passing without the ritualistic day-long feast. Usually in the morning, my brother and dad and I would drive bare-footed and bathing suit-clad down the road to Madeleine Point, a local swimming cove. If it was low tide, it made our task of seaweed collecting quite easy. We’d pull the green strands from the exposed rocks they were fiercely attached to, and we’d fill coolers with the stuff and place it in the back of the car for the short trip home. If it was high tide, well then, we’d go swimming.

Back in the kitchen, my mom would be preparing the clams, which always need to be thoroughly scrubbed. And she’d take a few of them to make the clam broth in which you “clean” the steamers again at the table. And then there was the melted butter in little cups, which I remember carrying out precariously on trays to the lawn, if we were lucky, or the covered porch if it was a rainy day. She’d have already shopped, too, for the day’s fixings: the onions, potatoes, eggs, and corn that we piled on top of the fire to accompany the lobsters and clams.

The feeling of Fall has entirely settled in this week. Some of the trees outside my office windows are changing color, and my long-sleeved shirts have taken the prominent place in my closet. It was warm yesterday and I found myself thinking that I didn't want it to be warm. I was done with warm. The words of the day these days are crisp, colorful, calm, cozy.  All "C" words, strangely.  I'm not sure what that means, but the point is that I am feeling settled in and preparing for the quietude of the coming seasons in Maine.

The weather in Midcoast Maine has been just amazing the last few weeks. We had that hurricane scare a little while back, which turned out to be not much of anything, but since then it's been downright perfect. First it got cold at night. Waking up in the morning with the windows open and being just freezing has felt so good.

And recently we've had some wonderful late-summer thunderstorms. The other morning I woke up with my kids and dog hunkered down in my bed because the house was shaking from the sounds of the thundercrash.

And another great weather feature that we've been experiencing with some frequency — as a byproduct from our thunderstorms — has been rainbows. Here at the Down East offices I've spied three in the last week. On my way out last night I caught this one with my smartphone.