Yesterday, for Mother’s Day, my wife I drove up to Lincoln, Maine (about an hour north of Bangor, where we live) to have dinner with her family. This is odd, because all of her family either lives in the Bangor/Brewer area, or lives south of the Bangor/Brewer area.

Anyway, the reason for the northward trek was to have dinner at a particular chinese restaurant that my mother-in-law wanted to go to. The food was okay — certainly nothing spectacular in my opinion, but that’s beside the point. There are a couple of amusing things I noticed during the trip — things you’re only likely to see in northern Maine (or perhaps a similarly rural area)…

There was a self-serve car wash (which are scattered across the countryside like dandelions up here) that had a bay large enough for the tractor part of a tractor-trailer (I’d never personally seen anything like that before). And it was in use at the time for just that purpose.

The other thing I found really amusing (and this is almost certainly a pure Maine thing), the restaurant we went to was having a buffet (as most chinese restaurants in the area do at one time or another). One of the items in the buffet was fried clams.

Yes, that’s right… not some kind of clever chinese-food take on this Maine dietary staple, but breaded and fried clams just like you can get at any roadside stand down on the coast.

I mean, I like seafood as much as the next guy (at least, the next guy who likes seafood), but when I go to a chinese buffet… I don’t expect to see something like that.

And they weren’t even the good fried clams — you know, whole clams with the belly intact — but the less appealing (but more tourist friendly) clam strips.

You just have to wonder sometimes.