Bradbury Mountain State Park and some Ethiopian food

Yesterday was an unexpectedly wonderful day. I tend to be a little bit of a creature of habit, but yesterday I discovered two great new things.

The guy I am dating suggested we try hiking at Bradbury Mountain State Park yesterday afternoon. Although it's less than half an hour from my house, I'd never been. I just don't tend to head inland very often in the summer, and in the winter I head north to ski. It was easy to find and super easy to park. We were on the trail in no time. We selected the steepest and more direct path to the summit and were at the top in 10 minutes!

Dixie beat me, even though her legs are even shorter than mine!

We took a longer route down, and then made a wrong turn, so we ended up looping around the outside of the entire park. It was nice a cool, even on a hot humid day. The trails were pretty easy footing, I'm thinking it would be a great place to trail run if I can ever motivate myself to trail run.

At night, I met my friend for the first Friday Art Walk in Portland. We started at the Portland Museum of Art, where they had a great art of the Normandy Coast Exhibit. I am sucker for impressionism. They also had a great Maine focused exhibit. I am also a sucker for a good Maine oceanscape. 

After a couple more stops at little galleries, we were starving. We decided it was the perfect night to try Asmara, an Ethiopian restaurant.  We started with honey wine. I don't know what exactly was in it, but it was good and strong. I felt like I was floating on a cloud for the rest of the night.

 The food is served family style on top of injera, a spongy flat bread. We got chicken in yellow curry, a spicy spinach and potato dish, and then spinach and kale, and red lentils for sides. It took a few bites to get used to scooping up bites of food with the injera, but we were totally into it by the end. The injera right up the chicken was the best because it had soaked up all the extra sauce.

In our honey wine haze we headed out for some more art walking. I love all the street performers in the summer. Fire hula-hooping seemed to be the most common act.

We ended the night at Blue, where we were drawn in by the music of Merrily James. It was a great end to the day, sitting and sipping some french roast and listening to to Merrily cover everything from Bruce Springstein to Prince.