Spinney's Restaurant
987 Popham Road
Phippsburg, ME 04562
(207) 389-1122
spinneys.comI am just not happy with experiences near Popham Beach. Spinney's was really marginal, except for the seals. Just look at that big leaf of lettuce. The meat was not sweet and mostly flavorless. The waitstaff was overwhelmed. The staffing problem seemed clear to me: there were 3 people working as hostesses and 2 people waiting tables. The actual waitstaff was trying to keep up, but it was clear there were others not pulling their weight.
The view from anywhere down there is spectacular. Right off the mouth olf the Kennebec is Sequin Island with its picturesque lighthouse. I had the good fortune to sail out to Seguin last summer and hike around the island. This should be on your bucket list-I digress. There are a lot of playful seals at the mouth of the Kennebec and worth the trip to watch. Fort Popham is adjacent to Spinney's parking lot and also worth the trip. The Fort is a great place that's free and fun for kids to climb around on and imagine days gone by.
Come to Popham Beach and come to Fort Popham- bring a picnic.
At Bath, in 2018, we headed south on our way to Popham Beach, & presently found ourselves in a sawdusty delicatessen in tiny Winnegance, Maine, where a very old, remarkably obese lady lost her balance on the last step on a steep flight of stairs & fell forwards hard on the floor.
ReplyDeleteWe bolted out of our chairs & lifted her up. That is, we tried to lift her up.
It wasn't easy. By the third time that we were counting "3-2-1," so as to lift in unison, I very much wanted her to stop apologizing for having fallen down, because it was terrible that someone should be so embarrassed.
Later, Elena told me that the deli owner told her that this was the second time that she had fallen down --- minutes earlier, she had taken a tumble at the base of the outdoor steps (all because she was too proud to use the mechanical lift on the side of the building to get up to the deli on the second floor).
The food being tasteless and the local newspaper not much fun to read, that was our twin-and-long-overdue cue to leave --- & we did, as soon as we could extricate ourselves from having been boxed in by a local jerk who had parked his monster red truck an inch or two right in front of our car.
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After Winnegance, we drove south to Popham Beach, located at the very end of an endless rocky peninsula extending out into the Atlantic.
Spinney's, where we had booked a one-night stay on August 28th on the return trip south from Deer Isle, turned out to be a rough-&-tumble hotel - the only one in this remote location, which features one of Maine's very few sandy beaches.
Such threadbare luxury for a night or two is fine with me. However, it met with instant disapproval by my wife, now delighted that months earlier, she had also booked a room at the Harraseeket Inn in nearby Freeport on the same date (which is where we ended up staying).
We entered their restaurant. On the wall a stern warning was posted that only diners & guests of the hotel could use the restrooms.
The manager recoiled, almost in shock, when I said, "Excuse me, but we have a reservation at Spinney's hotel four days from now, on the 28th --- would you mind if I..."
This will be, no doubt, one of the great hot-stove stories told in Maine in the winters to come, its popularity due to how it illustrates the lengths to which them no-good, low-down, conniving tourists will go in order to take advantage of the natives.
Not so. I was telling the truth. We had paid upfront for the Spinney's reservation &, as it turned out, never asked for a refund. We're in the Guinness Book of Records for having paid the most expensive restroom fee in America.
DR