I slept well and headed out the next day to Portland. My guidebook and my host had suggested a number of places on Commercial Street, so I drove that way and was lucky to find clearly marked directions and on street parking.
Portland bustles with people, particularly on a holiday weekend. I started by window shopping along the street, chatting with friendly sales people. The town has a 19th century charm, and I soon found myself drawn further into the city away from the waterfront, wandering from store to store until I reached Monument Square, which commemorates Maine’s participation in the Civil War.
Since one of the shopkeepers suggested that I eat at the Portland Lobster Company on the waterfront, I headed back to the waterfront for lunch. The wait was long, but I eventually sat out on their deck with my first lobster roll and some local cider, passing up some interesting desert options along the way.
After lunch,I headed back into the town. My first stop was the Sweetgrass Winery Tasting Room, where I joined two other groups in tasting gin and wine. We all provided each other with advice on selecting from the very interesting menu of options. I left with two bottles of wine, and felt the after-effects of drinking wine while being dehydrated. Despite this, I found my way to the Maine Historical Society and Wadsworth Longfellow House.
The home is the oldest standing structure on the Portland peninsula and was where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow spent his early life until moving to Boston to teach at Harvard. The house was built by his grandfather shortly after his service in the American Revolutionary War and remained in the family until his sister donated it to the Maine Historical Society in 1901. It is well preserved, and offers a mostly self-guided tour of both the house and gardens, which was hosting a poetry reading that night. I spent time talking with some of the historical society staff, and learned that a lot of outsiders are coming to Maine, and that some think it is changing the character of the place. Some of those outsiders are tourists from further south who want newer homes and faster lives, and some are Somali refugees who flooded into the Lewiston area at the start of the millennium to the consternation of many long time residents. Later, it occurred to me that I should have coordinated my visit to meet a few academic colleagues. But the trip was for touring, so I bought a collection of Longfellow’s poems and a book on the new Mainers and headed back into the hot day.
Since I had eaten lunch, I stopped off at The Holy Donut for my afternoon snack. Now that I had circled the city twice by foot in the heat, my feet were blistered and sore and the sun had sapped quite a bit of energy. I eased into an empty Adirondack chair on Commercial Street, ate my donut, and decided to tour around in my car for a bit.
I headed across the Casco Bay Bridge to see some lighthouses. My first stop was the Portland Breakwater Lighthouse at Bug Light Park.
I took my sore feet and dying cell phone out to this little lighthouse, which was full of families celebrating the holiday. From there, I drove to Spring Point Ledge Lighthouse, which had fewer people.
It is very picturesque, but by this point, my feet were not up for the difficult walk out to the closed lighthouse, so I moved forward, hoping my cell phone had enough battery life for both photos and navigation through the rest of my day. My third lighthouse was Portland Head Light at Fort Williams Park.
The keeper’s house was already closed when I got there, but the grounds were lush and easy to navigate. The iconic site was also full of families and picnickers, but is vast enough to not feel crowded. I was surprised that my cell phone had enough life for the photos.
Rather than push my luck trying to get to a few more remote sites, I headed back for the hotel, passing through Old Orchard Beach along the way. It was packed, with traffic stopped to a crawl so that police could direct traffic into and out of the town center. As I sat waiting on Rte 9 along the coast, I could see the two Maines that I had heard about at the Maine Historical Society. There was amble evidence of the new construction there, mingling with the older motel structures. There is considerable money to be made in holiday rentals at this beach, but it has crowded the place. The traffic was slower there than when I went to South Beach in Miami, and I did not see any compelling reason to stop in the town once I was waved into it. Instead, after a long, hot, wonderful day of touring, I headed back to my motel to put my feet up and get another good night of sleep.