New England Vacation – Day 13: Traveling Down to Portland

This was a travel day as we left Bar Harbor in the morning and headed south. We took the scenic route along the coast, but as it was so foggy the entire way, we didn’t see much.

Kai slept in the car for much of the morning. Is it wrong to say how much I appreciated his nap?

The one stop we wanted to make was the LL Bean flagship store in Freeport, Maine.

The store has separate buildings for clothing, hunting & fishing, and home goods. As someone who enjoys LL Bean’s clothing, it was great to see the full selection here.

And yet, we walked out of the store without a single item – because we had everything we bought shipped home. ☺

After that, we checked in at our hotel and used their indoor swimming pool.

For dinner, we went to a restaurant that was near our hotel. Unlike Bar Harbor, we found out that Portland has several Japanese restaurants so my wife was able to finally satisfy her urge for Japanese food.

Kai and I had the miso soup with shiitake mushrooms.

My wife and I shared this appetizer.

For the main entrée, Kai had this big pile of tempura. He ate all of the shrimp while my wife and I helped with some of the vegetables.

My wife and I each had the omakase sushi (chef’s selection).

The waitress had told us that no soy sauce was needed with this sushi. We found out that many of the pieces of sushi had a unique taste that I had never experienced in sushi before. My wife said it was her co-favorite meal of the trip along with the lobster at Thurston’s. I enjoyed it, too, though with the price of the meal double that of “the best lobster ever” I would say that I preferred Thurston’s over this on that alone. All in all, though, it was very nice.

So, it was a pleasant, very low key day.

We needed a low key day.