As luck would have it, right between where we parked for the balloon festival and Railroad Park was an unpreposessing door in the Bates Mill Complex renovated part of the huge mill with a sign “Fishbones” over it. It looked like a restaurant.It was!. Now, that link is a press release, so you don’t have to take it 100% seriously, but we haven’t run into that good a restaurant in our part of Maine yet. Near Boothbay / Damariscotta / Pemaquid, yes, and in Portland, yes, but Fishbones was a classy joint by our standards. The prices were at most 2/3 what you would pay in the Boston area for comparable food. Our only complaint was that it was a very noisy room. I think the brick walls and varnished wood ceiling just don’t absorb noise at all. Since it was the day after our anniversary, and we hadn’t gone out to dinner the night before because of driving to Maine, we wanted to go to a nice place. Usually we don’t get dessert in restaurants, but for our anniversary we splurged, and the desserts, a flourless chocolate cake and a pear-frangipane tart, were excellent.
We walked back to the park for a last look at the balloons. At eight o’clock there was supposed to be “moonglow”, balloons lit up from inside with the burners. It wasn’t worth writing home about, but you do get one more picture:
