The Lobster Pound in Deer Isle, Me.

Front Door at Eaton's Lobster Pond
Originally uploaded by thegreatplotnik.

The Lobster Pound serves 1 1/4 pound lobsters. They come with a metal cup of drawn butter, fries, slaw and brown bread. Duck, BZ and Finch ordered lobster and shared it around, while Crow had the haddock and the blueberry pie.

When asked why he was ordering blueberry pie, since his wife had made a delicious blueberry pie only the night before, half of which was still on the counter at home, Crow pulled himself out of trouble by saying: "This blueberry pie is only half as good as yours. But it is still worth ordering."

Plotnik dithered but went with the seafood chowder which was made up of haddock, shrimp, scallops and lobster, butter and cream. It came in a small bowl which the lady refilled without being asked. It came with homemade brown bread.

You enter the good-sized lobster shack at the foot of the bay through wooden doors. Each door sports a lobster-shaped cutout. You get a bib with a lobster on it.

The lobsters live in salt water tanks, where they have been put when taken from the lobster pound, which is a salt water pond, into which they are dumped when they come from the lobster boats. They'll stay alive in that pond, sometimes far into winter when the price gets high enough for the lobstermen to want to sell them. Otherwise, the lobstermens' families eat lobster, lobster and more lobster. It did not appear that there were any lobstermen eating dinner in Eaton's Lobster Pond.

Lobster rules in Deer Isle, Me., but Plot isn't sure how many you can eat at one time. It must be the richest food in the world. It would be worth a lot of money to bring in Kobayashi, the Japanese 145-pounder who ate 53 hot dogs in 12 minutes at Coney Island, give him a bib and a lobster pick and watch him go.

Maine crabs are called picky-toe crabs. They are small and they are an extra that come from the lobster traps. The women take the crabs and they and their children pick them -- which means removing the meat from the crabs -- and sell the picked crab meat for $15 a pound. Finch's crabcakes took two pounds of crab for nine crabcakes, and Plotnik has the recipe.

Lobsters wholesale for $3.95 a pound. The lobstermen sell them to middlemen who tack on a few bucks and sell them to restaurants and markets. Since the lobsters don't have anything done to them except boiling, it's hard to see how they get up to $25 in a restaurant, but they do. Even at the Lobster Pound in Deer Isle, one lobster cost $20 and two were $29.95.

Sadly, BZ goes back to NYC this afternoon, so we're sitting around the kitchen this morning, staring out at the harbor, pine trees and overcast skies, thinking about where we could all go together, which is is a strange thing to be thinking about since we're all together already, right now.

Indonesia has been mentioned. Perhaps BZ and perhaps even The Big E could accompany Duck and Plot to Argentina and Paraguay in the Spring. Add in The Maynard Trio (PD, 5-H and Li'l Maynard), and it would truly be a perfect world. Ain't gonna happen. But that's one of those delightful things people do while traveling -- think about the world and the wonderful way it could be, if only...if only.