Greetings from the Harraseeket Inn!  As Thanksgiving draws near, it's time to thank our guests for their loyal patronage, and this month a very special thanks goes out to those of you who were staying with us during the rare "bomb cyclone" on October 29-30 that knocked out power to half a million Mainers. Apparently this meteorological phenomenon is also referred to as "bombogenesis" and it occurs when low-pressure systems rapidly intensify, dropping at least 24 millibars in 24 hours.  When two separate storms slam into each other it tends to create a super strong bomb cyclone, and this is what happened. (This is a brief video of the folks up in Camden and Rockland harbors scrambling to secure their boats.) We were warned to expect torrential rains and hurricane force winds, but the inn is on a very special grid, similar to the grids that service hospitals and other critical infrastructure.  Not because we're that critical, but because LLBean's flagship store, along with the police and fire station, are very special, so we don't have power outages all that often and when they do occur, they're almost always remedied within a few hours.  

The power went out around five thirty am on Monday morning after a very wild night, and we had a lot of guests to serve breakfast to.  We don't have a back-up generator but we do have gas ranges in the kitchen and a very talented and unflappable breakfast chef, Ken Collins, who also works in the Broad Arrow Tavern. He cooked breakfast as if it were any other day, wearing a head lamp so he could see what he was doing. We also have an equally heroic morning crew, who showed up despite the challenges of navigating under and over downed trees and power lines, in high winds and driving rain, to make it to work. They got breakfast out on time and though we couldn't make toast, nobody went hungry and the coffee was hot. Our housekeeping crew was two hours late but they persevered. Every time the road they were on became impassable, they turned around and tried another route. When they finally arrived, they cleaned guest rooms using cell phone flashlights in the bathrooms for illumination and hokeys on the floors.  What a great team of employees we have, they all just rolled up their sleeves and pitched right in. We kept waiting for the power to come back on, but it didn't. A big tree was visible to us, sprawled across Route 1 just north of the inn, tangled in the power lines, and all day long we didn't see a single CMP truck, a pretty good indicator that things were just as bad everywhere.

Our phones were dead, the computers were dead, everything that required electricity was dead and because the tavern had no power to operate hood fans, the only source of cooking was the brick oven.  Chef Dave Duda and his crew set up a lunch buffet using food from a cancelled meeting, and pizzas were on tap for the rest of the day. Meanwhile, we were facing a night without electricity because, according to a recording at CMP accessed by cell phone, it could be another day or so before power was restored. In spite of this, guests weren't checking out and high tailing it for home. They were staying put, and our incoming guests had no idea they were checking into an inn without power, because we couldn't contact them. So off to LLBean we went, in search of LED lanterns for guest rooms, public areas, hallways and bathrooms.  We nearly cleaned out their lantern section (thank goodness for LLBean) and also used the battery operated Halloween candles in the gift shop, which lent a ghoulish ambiance to the front desk.  Votive candles flickered romantically on all the tavern tables, but it was starting to get dark.  Really dark.

Then, just as guests were settling into the really dark tavern for their evening pizzas, the fire alarm went off.  This was triggered by a loss of pressure in the sprinkler system, which uses an air compressor to keep the lines charged. The fire department came and the building had to be evacuated until the cause of the alarm was found and fixed.  Meanwhile, the pizzas got cold.  The fire chief announced that employees would have to patrol the halls all night long in the absence of a working sprinkler system.  It was shaping up to be a long and challenging night when all of a sudden, at seven pm, the lights came back on.  No matter where you were standing in the inn, you could hear the rousing cheers of both guests and employees.  Let there be light!  We were very, very lucky.  Some Mainers didn't get their power back for ten days. Fortunately the weather wasn't bitterly cold or it could have been much worse.  Compared to what happened to Puerto Rico, this power outage was a minor inconvenience. Many thanks to all the linemen and women, some from Canada, who worked non-stop to restore power to our state.

How great are our guests?  One charming woman, a guest who stays with us often, came to the front desk Monday evening and handed us a generous stack of wonderful homemade chocolate bars.  "I thought you could use these," she said.  That delicious chocolate was just the boost we needed to get us through what had been a very stressful day. The next morning I was sharing breakfast with my mom in the dining room and another guest approached our table, gave us a big smile and said, "I just want you to know, that was the best Halloween party ever!"