My problem with Maine: every time I go up for the hiking, I come home having gained weight I then have to carry up a mountain. The diners are a big part of it, and a new roundup from Ever After in the Woods collects twelve of the mom-and-pop kind, which is exactly the kind I care about.

The list leans hard on hearty breakfasts and local favorites, which is the correct way to do it. Any diner guide that skips breakfast isn't a diner guide, it's a cry for help. These are the places with laminated menus, a regulars' counter, and a cook who's been on the flat top since before you owned a car that could reach Maine.

I won't reprint the whole list because the original piece does that job fine, but the spread covers the state the way a good diner crawl should. Coastal spots, inland spots, small towns you'd otherwise blow past at 55. That last category is the sneaky value here. In my experience the best food in a state like Maine isn't at the exit ramp, it's twenty minutes off the highway in a town with one blinking light, in a building that used to be something else entirely.

What I'd tell any hiker reading this: build the trip around the diners, not despite them. Maine has some of the best trail access in the East, from Acadia to the Bigelow range to about a thousand unnamed ridgelines in between, and a 3,000-calorie pancake situation is not a liability when you've got eight miles and 2,000 feet of elevation ahead of you. That's fuel planning. That's my story and I'm keeping it.

The thing is, these places matter beyond breakfast too. Mom-and-pop diners are usually the de facto community center in small Maine towns, the spot where the cross-country skiers and the lobstermen and the leaf-peepers all end up in the same line at 8 a.m. You learn more about a region from a counter stool than from any visitor center, and the coffee's better.

Fall is coming, which means Maine's about to hit its best two months. The foliage crowds are worth dodging on the trail but they don't ruin the diners, they just make the wait longer. Go early, eat big, hike it off, repeat. Plan it right and you can hit two or three of these twelve in a long weekend and still get your miles in.

Check the full list at the link above, then argue with it. Everyone has a Maine diner that got left off, and the comments under pieces like this are usually half the fun. Mine's a little breakfast place outside Bethel that I will not be naming, because the wait is already long enough.