Visit Maine Like A Mainer! Greater Portland and Casco Bay (Part 2 - Freeport)

Our series on Visiting Maine Like a Mainer turns now to the Freeport and environs area of the region known as Greater Portland and Casco Bay (previous posts have included the Maine Beaches, Greater Portland and Casco Bay (Portland area) and Downeast and Acadia).

Freeport is widely known as the home of retail giant L.L. Bean. In fact the well-known outlets and stores in Freeport are all around the L.L. Bean campus, with its flagship store, hunting and fishing store, bike and kayak store, and its outlet store. Oh, and the L.L. Bean home store is slated to open later in the year. Around it sit over 160 other stores and restaurants, providing something for everyone.

Not quite as well-known are the two beautiful state parks, Wolfe Neck State Park and Bradbury Mountain State Park. Both have excellent hiking trails. Wolfe Neck offers trails along the edge of Casco Bay, while Bradbury Mountain, as its name implies, takes you up above the neighboring communities for a view across the coastal areas.

Nearby, also, in addition to Portland and its shopping and fine dining, are the Portland Head Lighthouse and Cape Elizabeth's Two Lights. To the north is Bowdoin College, Eagle Island, Bailey Island, Georgetown Island, Reid State Park, Popham Beach State Park, and the hideaway village of Five Islands. Maine's Desert is also nearby.

Freeport's central location makes it ideal for adding to your shopping vacation with golf, and exploring all the Maine coast has to offer.

Maine events - Things are happening in Maine

We received an email from L.L. Bean today, reminding us of their giant July 4th celebration, taking place here in Freeport, on July 4 and continuing on July 5.

This is a great event every year, from the morning parade put on by the town of Freeport (we all gather on the front lawn, as it goes right past the front of Brewster House), to the sidewalk sales and other events, free concerts at L.L. Bean (Patty Loveless is on Saturday night, July 4), followed by a huge (and we do mean huge) fireworks show. It is a fun time for all!

That brings to mind several other events that are coming up in the area. The first concert in L.L. Bean's 2009 Summer Concert Series (all concerts are free) is this weekend as Madeiline Peyroux appears in L.L. Bean's Discovery Park in Freeport. The concerts continue every Saturday night through Labor Day.

Meanwhile, the highly acclaimed Maine State Music Theatre is presenting "Crazy for You" through July 11, followed by "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" which begins July 15.

Dan Zanes and Friends appear in the L.L. Bean Summer Concert Series on July 11, Matt Dusk on July 18, and Punch Brothers featuring Chris Thile on July 25.

Meanwhile, Brewster House and the other Historic Freeport Bed and Breakfasts' monthly Open House is from 2 p.m. - 4 p.m. on July 17.

Visit Maine Like A Mainer! Downeast and Acadia

This stop on our tour through the regions of Maine brings us to Downeast and Acadia, for many, best known as the home of Bar Harbor, and that section of the Maine coast stretching north of Bar Harbor to the border with Canada. Previous posts can be found here.

This region has several sub-regions, each with its own beauty and activities. We won't necessarily cover them all individually, but note that you can find out about each of them at the Downeast and Acadia region website. In this post we'll briefly introduce the entire region, and in later posts we'll talk more about some of the specific areas. One good overview page to check is Isabelle's Travel Guide from @IsabellesTravel.

The area most people are familiar with is Mount Desert Island, and its best-known town, Bar Harbor. This is also the location of Acadia National Park - one of America's most-visited national parks. The park encompasses the major part of Mount Desert Island, as well as the Schoodic Penninsula and several outlying islands. One of the sights not to miss is the view from the top of Cadillac Mountain, at 1,532 feet the tallest of the seventeen peaks in the park. The scenes from Park Loop Drive are wonderful, and you can easily visit the towns of Bar Harbor, Southwest Harbor and Northeast Harbor, as well as Bass Harbor Lighthouse, and many other wonderful sights.

While Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park are perhaps the best known parts of the Downeast and Acadia region, the other parts are also well worth a visit! The East Penobscot Bay sub-region includes the wonderful new Penobscot Narrows Bridge and Observatory, as well as Bucksport and Fort Knox (not the one with the gold, though). Its Blue Hill penninsula is beautiful, and filled with artists, charming inlets and harbors, and quaint villages.

Ellsworth and Trenton provide a wonderful gateway to Mount Desert Island, with a history of their own, antique shops, and more!

The sub-region known as Schoodic and Downeast provides a region of the Maine coast that sees far fewer visitors than the areas from Bar Harbor south. In fact, at Brewster House, we have guest who spend a few days in our area, then head north every year for several days of isolated reverie in the Schoodic and Downeast region.

Machias Bay is another historical beauty, set against the rugged Maine coast. In late August this area celebrates the Maine wild blueberries - a delight to the senses!

The sub-region known as "Way Downeast" stretches along the coast to the Canadian border and includes West Quoddy Head Lighthouse - marking the easternmost point in the United States. It also stretches north and inland, to the Greater East Grand Lake region, and its magnificent wilderness vistas.

Before preparing this post, we asked friends on Twitter to recommend some of their favorite areas of Maine, saying we would link back to them if we used their recommendations. We received several great suggestions, many in this region. Those we didn't use here, may well appear in future posts on some of the sub-regions of Downeast and Acadia.

Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions of things we should include in our "Visit Maine Like A Mainer" series, please feel free to post them in the comments, or to Tweet them to us.

Map of Maine Lobster Shacks! Great Places for Lobster.

Update: We've received suggestions for additional spots, so we've removed the "12" from the title, as that number is no longer correct - there are more!

Not too long ago we wrote a post about lobster in Maine (Visiting Maine Part 4 - Lobster, Lobstah, Ahhh, Heaven). In that post we mentioned an article from Travel + Leisure magazine from a few years ago, called "10 Best Lobster Shacks in Maine." We noted that a couple of our favorites were missing from the list.

We've also posted previously about the seasons for lobster, hard and soft shells, etc., in a post called "Where Should I Go for Maine Lobster."

Little did we know, but Travel + Leisure has updated that article with a June, 2009 version of "10 Best Lobster Shacks in Maine." There are some wonderful places for lobster in that article, but we still think they're missing some good ones.

However, one of the questions we most frequently hear is, "Where should I go for a lobster dinner?" Consequently, we've put together a map of the top 10 from Travel + Leisure, plus a couple of our favorites, and release it below as a public service :^)


View Favorite Lobster Shacks (and similar spots) in a larger map

If we missed your favorite lobster shack or restaurant, please let us know in the comments and we'll see if we can add it for future reference.

Visit Maine Like A Mainer! Greater Portland and Casco Bay (Part 1)

The region known as Greater Portland and Casco Bay includes not only Portland and its neighboring communities, but also several surrounding areas that are popular with visitors, and stretches north on US-1 as far as Freeport, which deserves a separate description of its own. Because there is so much that is fun to do in this region, we'll discuss Portland and its immediate neighbors in this post, and the next post in this series will look at Freeport and some of the other neighboring areas.

A metro area population of 230,000 and a Portland city population of 64,000, make Portland and its metro area Maine's most populous. For the visitor from larger cities, such as Boston, New York, London, Paris, Chicago, Tokyo, etc., Portland can be an amazing destination.

Small, compared to these other cities, it is easy to find your way around Portland, and it is not far from the busy downtown streets to the bay or to the open countryside. Yet it has the feel of a much larger city, and many of the amenities, as well.

A favorite thing to do in Portland is eat. There are many fine restaurants (often far more than you would expect for a city of this size), with chefs who have departed the hustle and bustle of New York or Boston for the more relaxing atmosphere of Maine's famous port city. Many can be found (with reviews) on the Food in Portland website.

A stroll along the Old Port district takes you to shops, art galleries, museums, restaurants and historical landmarks - even a section of the Berlin Wall on display. You can take a sail on an antique schooner, a sightseeing tour of Casco Bay and Portland, walking tours, or even a tour on a lobster boat - pulling your own lobster traps!

Visit the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow house and museum, or see a bit of Victorian America at the Victoria Mansion.

If you are looking for something a bit more rural and unusual, a 30 minute drive west and north will bring you to South Windham, where, on Covered Bridge Road, you can see one of Maine's historic covered bridges, the Babb's Bridge, built in 1864 (and rebuilt in 1976 after vandals destroyed it in a 1973 fire).

Of course, no visit to Portland is complete without a visit to Cape Elizabeth's Fort Williams Park, and Portland Head Lighthouse. The park is maintained free of any entrance fee by the citizens of Cape Elizabeth as a gift to visitors to the area. There is a small fee to enter the museum at the lighthouse. The park also includes remnants of military forts, an old mansion, a playground and a small beach. It is a great location to spend most of a day.

Of course, in a short article like this, it is impossible to discuss every activity in an area, and there are many, many, more adventures to be had in and around Portland.

There's more to Maine!

BBC Spot on Tourism in Maine - Brewster House Mentioned

We posted this on our Facebook page and on Twitter when we learned about it, so apologies to our friends there who have already seen it. However, we didn't want to omit our friends on the blog, so we're providing the information (and a bit more detail) here, as well.

The short version of the stoy is that BBC News did a short spot on tourism in Maine. Much of it was filmed at Brewster House, and Scott appears, talking about the coming season. The video can be seen on the BBC web site.

There is, of course, a bit more background.

We were contacted by Greg Dugal of Maine Innkeepers Association, who is interviewed on the segment, asking if we would like to talk with BBC News about such a story. Of course we were interested, and spoke with the producer by phone. They also asked how we were attempting to increase interest and attract guests, and we told them about our packages with Portland Schooner Co. They loved that idea, so they also contacted them about the video.

A few days later the BBC News crew arrived, cameraman, producer and on-air personality Philippa Thomas (we're not related, as far as we know). They were all delightful and professional.

First they filmed an interview on our guest porch with Greg Dugal, who gave them quite a lot of information on Maine and the outlook for tourism. Unfortunately, they only used a small portion of that interview. Then they came inside, and filmed Scott with Philippa Thomas walking through the ground floor rooms and discussing the house, the business climate, etc. Again, only a small amount was used in the clip. Next they were off to Camden to film the harbor (seen in the opening shots), and the next day to film at Portland Schooner.

Part of the BBC News objective was to report on the outlook for tourism in the face of a weak economy, so much of the clip sounds discouraging. However, all three of us (Greg Dugal, Scott, and Scott Reischman of Portland Schooner) feel that things are better than portrayed and attempted to say so. Unfortunately not many of those comments made it on the air.

The clip aired on Monday evening, June 8, 2009, but unfortunately they forgot to notify us (as they had planned to do), so we didn't see the clip until the next day when they informed us of the location on the BBC web site.

We hope to obtain a DVD of the full interviews, so we can see how the entire thing came out.

Visit Maine Like a Mainer! The Maine Beaches

For many in the eastern United States the area of Maine that is most familar is the southern Maine region known as the Maine Beaches.

The sandy beaches stretching across 30 miles of coastline have made this jewel of Maine a favorite of vacation visitors for many decades. Beginning only little more than an hour's drive north from Boston, or an hour east of Manchester, New Hampshire, the region encompasses the outlet malls of Kittery, the beaches and coves of York and York Beach, Wells, Kennebunk and Kennebunkport, Ogunquit and Old Orchard Beach.

Detailed information on lodging, restaurants and activities can be found at the Maine Beaches Association website, the Maine Tourism website, or the State of Maine's tourism website.

Among the well-known attractions are the Ogunquit Playhouse, celebrating 75 years of Broadway at the beach, and the Seashore Trolley Museum.

The Yorks are home to Cape Neddick Lighthouse (the Nubble) and When Pigs Fly, bakers of exquisite breads.

US-1 is a two-lane highway that runs from the Southern border of Maine, directly up through the towns of the Maine Beaches region. All along it you'll find antique shops, outlet centers and one-of-a-kind shops, as well as restaurants, including the historic Maine Diner, Bed & Breakfasts, hotels and motels, and many other things.

Lodging recommendations can be found at the Maine Innkeepers website, the Maine tourism sites mentioned above, or the Chamber of Commerce sites of any of the towns mentioned - all linked in the regional site.

Even for the experienced visitor, there's more to Maine!

Inn Your Dreams Seminar at Brewster House

Inn Your Dreams, Maine's oldest aspiring innkeeper course, has scheduled a course over three days of this year's Labor Day Weekend, to take place at Brewster House B&B in Freeport, Maine.

The seminar will begin with arrival and Welcome Gathering on Friday evening September 4th and end after lunch on Monday (Labor Day), September 7th. Classes will begin on Saturday morning the 5th.

The class is taught by Don Johnson, a former innkeeper and owner of several outstanding Maine B&B's and now a consultant and real estate broker specializing in representing buyers of fine inns. The course will also include presentations on specialized topics (some with guest expert speakers) such as business plans, preparing for bank financing, pricing your rooms, marketing your inn, technology and the inn, and more.

Please visit www.InnYourDreams.com for complete information and registration.

Visit Maine Like a Mainer! A Guide to Seeing the Best of Maine

In our prior series, Visiting Maine? Where to Find the Information You Need, we talked about the regions of Maine and where to find information about visiting.

Over the next several weeks we will be exploring the eight regions, Aroostook County, Downeast and Acadia, Greater Portland and Casco Bay, Kennebec and Moose River Valleys, Maine's Lakes and Mountains, Mid-Coast, the Maine Beaches, and the Maine Highlands (not necessarily in that order!), with an article on each region, its activities, areas of interest, and more.

Our idea is to provide a sampling of the things each area has to offer, and information on where to find recommendations for food, lodging, activities, and more. We hope this will help people explore the great state of Maine.

Here are the posts in this series:
The Maine Beaches
Greater Portland and Casco Bay (Part 1)
Downeast and Acadia
Greater Portland and Casco Bay (Part 2 - Freeport and Vicinity)
The Maine Highlands
Maine's Mid-Coast
Kennebec and Moose River Valleys
Lakes and Mountains
Aroostook County
Plan Your Trip!

For more information on Brewster House Bed & Breakfast, please visit our web site, or contact us using the information below.

Golf Maine with our Swing & Shop Special

Adding to our popular list of schooner and lighthouse specials, we are delighted to introduce our Swing & Shop special for 2009!

This special includes two nights at Brewster House (queen room, double occupancy), our delicious gourmet breakfasts, afternoon refreshments, plus one greens fee with cart at Fox Ridge Golf Club, Maine's premier golf destination, and a $50 gift card at L.L. Bean. It finishes off with a $50 gift certificate at Azure Cafe.

For more information, or to book, please contact check our availability page.