My wife and I have been on the road for ten days. Starting in Atlanta, we flew to Portland, ME where we spent three days. Portland was an interesting experience. We live a suburban life, so going to a city that is alive with people, tourists and locals, was quite a change. At the same time, it was actually a lot fun.

I wasn’t sure what I expected. The weather was awesome and actually a bit warmer than we expected. The town itself had a good feel to it and it’s actually one that I might want to revisit at some point. There were several things that surprised me, though.

I’ve been along the coasts of the southeast – the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida – where there is a distinct aroma that I’ve always associated with the ocean. Exactly what the aroma is, is difficult to describe. There’s a fishiness but combined with other odors, perhaps related to the marshes, rotting vegetation and so on. I was expecting that here but, to my surprise, the air smelled clean. That said, my wife was convinced, when we first arrived at the hotel, that she was smelling the distinctive aroma of marijuana in the hallways. When we encountered that same aroma outside, with no one around, I realized that apparently it is the smell of the seaweed, kelp, or whatever that is bound to the piers in the area. I guess they emit and odor when exposed to the air.

Another thing that surprised me was the number of homeless along the wharf. Now, Portland is a large town and there are always homeless in large towns. What surprised me were both the numbers of homeless as well as their visibility. I would have expected that the city officials would have been a bit more aggressive in controlling those numbers in areas where tourists (many tourists!) were visiting. The homeless were not threatening and didn’t, at least to my observation, attempt to harass the visitors, but their presence still created a bit of an uncomfortable situation, particularly when larger groups of them convened.

A third thing that surprised me (though I don’t really know why) was the frequency of cruise ships. On our first full day there a cruise ship pulled in discharging several hundred passengers for the day. At exactly 6 PM the ship’s horn blew and they pulled out and sailed away. Two days later another ship with over 300 rooms docked for the day. And like the previous ship, at precisely 6 PM it sailed away. I guess I never really thought about Portland as being a cruise destination but it clearly is.

Finally, I was a bit surprised at the number of bus tours that arrived. There were dozens. Again, I guess I just didn’t really think about it being that type of destination.

The “Old Port” section of town is really nice and I loved seeing the old buildings, wandering down the wharves and peeking into the old shops. One of those buildings housed a shop stocking hundreds of awesome old ship parts. Some were quite interesting, like the compass housing with a working compass, marker lights, and other much more mundane such as navigation and marker lights, and even rope cleats, pulleys, and the like. If it came off a boat, it was likely in that shop.

What let me down was that this section was really just a tourist trap. Lots of restaurants (with exorbitant prices), lots of souvenir shops all selling essentially the same stuff (and again over priced). I would have loved to have seen more authenticity with shops for maritime materials. I’m sure those exist in Portland but not where we were.

I think it’s sad that what makes many towns like Portland attractive has been undermined by the tourist dollar. There is no authenticity, it’s all about shops selling souvenirs.

That said, there were some interesting sights to be seen.

For example, there is the beautiful Customs House that has been around since the mid 1800s. There’s also the “Workingmen’s Club” which I learned was a social club with goals of providing opportunities for education, political discourse, and general socialization for the men working along the wharves, many of whom were immigrants from Ireland and other countries. This was, apparently, an extension of the Workingmen’s clubs in Britain with one difference: In England, the clubs included a tavern for drinking while the Portland club apparently required abstinence.

Our second day there it rained, but we still were able to get down to Old Orchard Beach and to Portland Head Light, a great old lighthouse. It was very windy rainy that day, so the images I got were crappy but it was still a very neat experience.

Old Orchard Beach was particularly interesting to me. Now here at the end of September the beach was clearly not a destination and that was evidenced by all the empty hotel parking lots. But what surprised me was that there were NO big name hotels there. Everything was local which made me pine a bit for the days when the chains didn’t run (or is that ruin) everything? I suspect that taking a vacation at Old Orchard Beach would be a very different, and very much more relaxing experience than what we get in most beach towns. I may write more on OOB a bit later.

Our third day was spent driving across Maine, through New Hampshire, and into Burlington, VT. That’s for another post.