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The view we saw every morning at Lupine Lodge on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada. That bit of blue water you see is a bit of the Atlantic that separates Campobello from Eastport, Maine.

     I know, this doesn’t have much to do with real estate in Pinellas County, but it was a beautiful view that greeted us every morning on Campobello Island.
     Campobello is part of New Brunswick and is just off the coast of northern coastal Maine. It is best known as the summer residence of Franklin Roosevelt.
     We stayed there because we wanted the grandkids to get a little history lesson, but we also chose Campobello because we wanted to go to the annual Maine Blueberry Festival, which is in Machias, Maine in an area that offers very little in the way of hotel rooms.  We thought staying in Campobello would be a good and fun alternative, and it was.

One of the two guest buildings at Lupine Lodge

     We stayed in a place called the Lupine Lodge, which was very nice but a little on the primitive side. No air conditioning, no television, no phones in the rooms. The place was clean but I don’t think it had been updated since the pre-1920s, when the place was built.
     There was a restaurant on site that was pretty good, but we decided to venture off and see what other food opportunities existed on the island. Not a great decision, as it turned out, because there was only one other restaurant on Campobello. We had some breakfast there, though, and we returned the next night for dinner and had some very good losbter stew and scallops. Emily had a good-looking lobster roll.
     We spent part of an afternoon at Roosevelt’s summer “cottage” — I’ll do a separate post on that.
     All in all it was a great visit. I lived the first 40 years of my life in Maine and never visited Campobello. The trip up there gave me a chance to go back to Jonesport, the coastal fishing and lobstering village where I spent summers as a kid.
     The worst part of the Campobello visit may have been the border crossings — we had to go back and forth every day for three days, and crossing the U.S. – Canada border isn’t the simple picnic it used to be. The Border Patrol people are courteous but very businesslike, and passports are now a necessity.
     I’ll do separate posts on our whale-watching trip and on the blueberry pie-eating contest back in Machias at the Blueberry Festival.