Maine 2017 – Portland, ME

8/28/17

Monday was a walking tour of Portland day. As is a bit of a theme, we didn’t have specific plans or schedule. We drove into Portland and lucked out with some free parking on the edge of town. We wandered the waterfront docks, shops, etc and then looped up through the heart of town. We weren’t specifically in need of any stuff and neither of us really shops just to shop, so it was mostly just a walking tour of the city.

For the afternoon we drove over to South Portland to do a biking lighthouse tour. The biking was a combination of trails and city streets. Neither of us has a handlebar mount for a phone, so we discovered just how difficult it can be to follow google maps directions being dictated by a phone in your pocket. I think we saw three lighthouses by bike and then one more that we drove the car to.

The first lighthouse (where we parked) was Bug Light. It’s just a small station on the corner of Bug Light Park where we parked the car for our biking around. Though it’s listed first, we visited this one third after returning to the park from biking.
The first on the biking tour was the Spring Point Ledge Lighthouse. It was similar looking, but a bit larger, could have housed a person, and was out at the end of a much longer break wall.
The furthest one on the tour, Portland Head Lighthouse, was a full house (residence) on a cliff, in the more picturesque style. This one would have been cool to kayak around, and we could have had we been more motivated, but there weren’t any great launch sites. Also, we arrived by bike. It sits in Fort Williams Park and there are a lot of battery remains around the area, so we took our time wandering there.
After the bike tour, we drove up to Two Lights Lighthouse West Tower to see what we could, but it’s private and not really viewable.
The final lighthouse we did see was Cape Elizabeth Lighthouse. It’s also private, but stands on a cliff overlooking Dyer Cove.

It was low tide, so we wandered Dyer Point for a while, exploring tide pools. Possibly the most interesting part was the rock itself. It looked like petrified wood, but after much googling I confirmed that it was indeed rock. We stuck around for sunset, which turned out pretty decent given the lighthouse on a cliff in the foreground.

In the evening we returned to the hotel and walked into Freeport to visit the L.L. Bean. It’s big (and open 24 hours a day), and I guess that’s good, but like any flagship store it’s more for show than for shopping since you can get everything there from their catalog or online. We tried to hit up a brewery on the way back to the hotel, but apparently it was not a very popular place because the parking lot was empty, so even if they were still open, we decided to pass. I guess that was overall representative of the town – it was very dead, even considering the relatively low expectations given that it was a Monday night.

Graffiti wall next to the Eastern Promenade walk where it goes around the water treatment plant

Boat on a Wharf

Fishing boats, lobster traps, the smell of salt water and the sounds of seagulls.

Fort seen from Spring Point Ledge Lighthouse

It was sort of fun hopping the cracks of the large rocks

As you walked closer, the lighthouse foghorn became louder and off in the distance you could hear the more faint foghorn sound of the other very popular lighthouse about 3 miles south (by bike) in the Casco Bay...Portland Head Lighthouse