Maine’s state slogan — “The Way Life Should Be” — is either a bold piece of tourist marketing or a statement of genuine conviction, depending on where you stand. Spend enough time here, and you begin to suspect it is the latter. This vast, sparsely populated state at the northeastern corner of the continental United States is a place of extraordinary natural beauty, deep maritime tradition, fierce local pride, and a quality of light and air and silence that is increasingly difficult to find in the modern world. It is the largest of the six New England states, covering more ground than the other five combined, yet it holds fewer than 1.4 million permanent residents — a ratio of wilderness to people that gives Maine its defining character.
Maine is a state of superlatives. It has more coastline than California — over 3,400 miles when all the peninsulas, bays, and islands are accounted for. It contains the only place in the continental United States where the sun first strikes land each morning, on the summit of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park. It produces more wild blueberries than any other state in the nation. It is the source of roughly 90 percent of the country’s lobster harvest. Its North Woods constitute one of the largest remaining temperate wilderness areas in the eastern United States, larger than several sovereign nations. And its particular combination of rocky coast, deep forest, cold clear water, and hard-edged Yankee culture has made it the spiritual home of American landscape painting, literary regionalism, and a certain idea of rugged authenticity that the rest of the country has been romanticizing for more than two centuries.
Geography and the Shape of the State
Maine is bigger than most visitors expect and more varied than its coastal reputation suggests. The state divides naturally into several distinct regions, each with its own landscape, economy, and cultural character.
The South Coast, from Kittery at the New Hampshire border north to Portland, is the most densely populated and most visited portion of the state — a succession of sandy beaches, historic port towns, and resort communities that have drawn summer visitors since the 19th century. The Mid-Coast, stretching from Portland north to the Penobscot Bay region, is the heart of Maine’s maritime and fishing culture — a deeply indented coastline of peninsulas, harbors, and islands where lobstering, boat building, and the traditions of working waterfront life persist alongside a thriving arts scene. Downeast Maine, from the Penobscot Bay east to the Canadian border, takes its name from the old sailing phrase for running before the wind eastward along the coast and encompasses both Acadia National Park and the increasingly wild and remote reaches toward Lubec and Eastport.
The Western Lakes and Mountains region, inland from Portland and stretching to the New Hampshire and Quebec borders, contains the Sebago Lake country, the Oxford Hills, and the Rangeley Lakes — a landscape of deep forests, cold lakes, and ski mountains that is the playgrounds of New Englanders and increasingly of visitors from farther afield. And the vast North Woods — Aroostook County, the Kennebec and Penobscot headwaters, the Allagash Wilderness Waterway — constitute a wilderness of a scale and character that astonishes those who have thought of Maine purely as a coastal destination.
The coast itself demands a particular understanding. Maine’s coastline runs generally southwest to northeast, but the actual geometry is vastly more complex — a fractal elaboration of peninsulas, coves, river mouths, and islands that multiplies the apparent straight-line distance many times over. The character of the coast shifts as you move northeast. The sandy beaches of York and Wells and Old Orchard give way, north of Portland, to the rockier, more deeply indented coastline of the Mid-Coast, where granite ledges meet the sea and the tidal range — among the highest on the Atlantic coast — exposes vast flats of mud and rockweed twice daily. By the time you reach the Downeast coast, the landscape is as rugged and elemental as anything in New England — bold headlands, dark spruce forests running to the water’s edge, cold fogs rolling in off the Gulf of Maine.
The climate is genuinely four-seasonal, with winters that are serious about their business, particularly in the interior. The coast moderates temperature somewhat, but Maine coastal winters are not mild — cold, windy, and dark, they drive the summer population south and leave behind a year-round community that takes a certain pride in its endurance. Spring is mud season before it is anything else, the frost slowly leaving the ground and the logging roads becoming impassable in April. Summer, when it arrives, is glorious — warm but rarely hot on the coast, with long evenings of extraordinary light and the compensating beauty of a landscape that the cold months have kept fresh and uncrowded. Fall rivals any season for beauty, the hardwood forests of the interior and western mountains blazing with color while the coastal blueberry barrens turn a deep, saturated red.
Portland: Maine’s Urban Heart
Portland is Maine’s largest city and one of the most appealing small cities in the United States — a compact, walkable, historically layered place that manages to be simultaneously deeply rooted in its maritime past and aggressively contemporary in its cultural and culinary ambitions. Built on a small peninsula jutting into Casco Bay, Portland has been burned to the ground twice in its history — once by a British naval bombardment in 1775 and once by the Great Fire of 1866 — and rebuilt each time with an energy that has left it with a remarkable collection of Victorian commercial architecture alongside its older surviving structures.
The Old Port district, centered on Exchange Street and its surrounding blocks, is Portland’s commercial and social heart — a neighborhood of brick warehouses converted into restaurants, bars, boutiques, and galleries that has become one of the most vibrant urban districts in New England. The density of excellent restaurants here is extraordinary for a city of 70,000 people, and Portland’s food scene has earned national recognition that its size would not ordinarily warrant. The city has produced James Beard Award-winning chefs and a culinary culture that takes its seafood, its local farms, and its craft beverages with genuine seriousness. Fore Street restaurant, opened by chef Sam Hayward in 1996, is often credited with establishing Portland’s culinary identity — its wood-fired cooking of locally sourced ingredients set a standard that dozens of subsequent restaurants have built upon. The Portland Public Market and the weekend farmers markets offer direct access to Maine’s extraordinary agricultural and fishing bounty.
The Portland Museum of Art, designed by I.M. Pei and opened in 1983, houses one of the finest regional art collections in New England, with particular strength in Maine-connected artists — Winslow Homer, whose studio at Prouts Neck is accessible for tours, is represented by some of his finest seascapes, and the Wyeth Collection — works by N.C., Andrew, and Jamie Wyeth — reflects Maine’s long centrality to American representational painting. The museum’s temporary exhibition program is ambitious for its size, and the adjacent McLellan House, a Federal-period mansion incorporated into the museum complex, adds historic architectural depth to the experience.
The Eastern Promenade, a park running along Portland’s northeastern shore above the tidal flats of Back Cove and Casco Bay, offers one of the finest urban waterfront walks in New England — a sweeping view across the bay to the Calendar Islands and, on clear days, to the mountains of western Maine and New Hampshire. The Western Promenade, on the opposite side of the peninsula, overlooks the Fore River and the mainland beyond and contains the city’s finest concentration of Victorian residential architecture. Walking these two promenades gives a remarkably complete sense of Portland’s geography and its relationship to water.
The Casco Bay Lines ferry service, operating from the Maine State Pier, connects Portland with six inhabited islands in Casco Bay — Peaks, Little Diamond, Great Diamond, Cliff, Long, and Chebeague — offering both essential transportation for island residents and one of the most enjoyable recreational outings in the Portland area. A ride on the Bailey Island run — the longest regular ferry route — passes through the bay’s extraordinary island geography and provides a perspective on the Maine coast that no land-based viewpoint can match.
Acadia National Park: The Crown of Downeast
Acadia National Park is the most visited national park in the northeastern United States, drawing more than four million visitors annually to the island of Mount Desert Island and the surrounding Schoodic Peninsula and Isle au Haut. It is easy to understand the attraction: the park combines the most dramatic scenery on the Maine coast — granite peaks rising directly from the ocean, fjord-like sounds, pink granite headlands beaten by Atlantic surf — with a superbly maintained infrastructure of carriage roads, hiking trails, and scenic drives that make its landscapes accessible to visitors of nearly every ability level.
Mount Desert Island, connected to the mainland by a short causeway, is the third largest island on the Atlantic coast of the United States. Its interior is dominated by a series of rounded granite summits — the Porcupine Hills — rising above a landscape of glacially carved ponds, dense spruce-fir forest, and the remarkable fjord of Somes Sound, the only true fjord on the Atlantic coast of the United States. The island’s primary town, Bar Harbor, is the gateway to the park and one of the most visited communities in Maine — a Victorian resort town of considerable charm that is genuinely overwhelmed by visitors in July and August and considerably more pleasant in June, September, and October.
Cadillac Mountain, at 1,530 feet the highest point on the North Atlantic seaboard, is the park’s most celebrated destination and its most visited. The summit is reached by a 3.5-mile paved road and offers panoramic views that, on clear days, encompass an extraordinary sweep of ocean, islands, and mainland. The famous sunrise experience — Cadillac is among the first places in the continental United States to receive the sun’s rays from October through early March — draws early risers by the thousands and reservation systems have been instituted to manage the crowds. The summit trail and the South Ridge Trail offer hiker alternatives to the road, with the South Ridge route providing one of the finest ridge walks in the park.
The Carriage Road system, built between 1913 and 1940 by John D. Rockefeller Jr. who donated much of the land that became the park, is one of Acadia’s greatest treasures and a remarkable feat of philanthropic landscape design. Forty-five miles of broken-stone carriage roads, closed to motor vehicles and crossing 17 hand-crafted stone bridges of extraordinary quality, wind through the park’s interior, connecting its ponds and summits in a system that is equally beautiful on foot, bicycle, or horse. The carriage roads were designed with an aesthetic sensibility that reveals new vistas at every curve and manages the landscape’s grandeur with a restraint and skill that only improves with familiarity. Bicycle rentals are available in Bar Harbor, and a circuit of the carriage roads is one of the park’s most rewarding full-day experiences.
The Park Loop Road provides a 27-mile scenic drive through the park’s most dramatic coastal terrain. The section along the Ocean Path, from Sand Beach to Otter Cliffs, passes through some of the most spectacular scenery on the eastern seaboard — the crashing surf against the pink granite of Thunder Hole, the sheer 60-foot cliffs of Otter Cliffs rising directly from the Atlantic, the views across the open ocean from Otter Point. Sand Beach itself, one of the few sandy beaches in a park otherwise dominated by rock, is formed largely from the ground shells of marine organisms rather than quartz sand and maintains a water temperature that discourages all but the most determined swimmers — typically around 55 degrees Fahrenheit even in midsummer.
The hiking trails of Acadia range from gentle pond-side walks to genuine technical scrambles involving iron rungs and ladders set into the cliff faces. The Precipice Trail on Champlain Mountain, the Beehive Trail above Sand Beach, and the Ladders Trail on Megunticook Mountain are among the most thrilling hiking experiences on the East Coast — routes that require the use of hands and iron rungs bolted into vertical cliff faces, delivering heart-pounding exposure and extraordinary views to those willing to commit to them. The Jordan Pond Path, a gentle loop around the most beautiful of the park’s glacial ponds with the rounded summits of the Bubbles reflected in its still water, is one of the finest easy walks in New England, traditionally ending with popovers and tea on the lawn of the Jordan Pond House.
The Schoodic Peninsula, connected to the mainland east of Mount Desert Island and accessible only by road or by ferry from Bar Harbor, offers a less-visited but equally dramatic experience of the park. Its bold headlands of pink and dark basalt meet the open Atlantic with a force that is, if anything, more powerful than the Mount Desert coast, and the absence of the summer crowds that besiege Bar Harbor makes it a more peaceful and contemplative destination. The Schoodic Woods campground, relatively new, has made longer visits to this section of the park more practical.
Isle au Haut, a remote island accessible only by mail boat from the fishing village of Stonington, contains a small section of Acadia National Park along its western shore and offers one of the most genuinely wild and uncrowded hiking experiences in the entire national park system. The island’s trails traverse rugged coastal terrain with extraordinary views over the Gulf of Maine, and the very difficulty of getting there — the mail boat runs only a few times daily — ensures that the wilderness character is preserved. A small number of backcountry camping lean-tos are available by reservation, and demand far exceeds supply.
The Mid-Coast: Lobster, Boats, and Art
The Mid-Coast region, stretching from Brunswick and Bath north and east through the Pemaquid Peninsula, Rockland, Camden, and the Penobscot Bay islands, is the heart of what most people imagine when they think of Maine — rocky coves, lobster boats riding at their moorings, weathered shingle houses above granite ledges, the smell of salt and spruce and diesel and bait. It is also, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most culturally rich regions of rural America, with an extraordinary concentration of working artists, writers, museums, and performing arts organizations that have been drawn here by the same landscape that attracted the painters of the Hudson River School and their successors.
Bath, on the Kennebec River, is the City of Ships — a designation earned over three centuries of shipbuilding that continues today at Bath Iron Works, one of the primary builders of United States Navy surface combatants and one of the largest employers in Maine. The Maine Maritime Museum, occupying the site of a historic shipyard on the Kennebec riverbank, is one of the finest maritime museums in the country — its collections encompassing boat models, navigational instruments, paintings, photographs, and artifacts spanning the full range of Maine’s maritime history, from the age of sail through the lobster boat era. The museum’s grounds include a collection of historic boatbuilding and working waterfront structures, and its program of boat tours on the Kennebec provides additional perspective on the river’s maritime geography.
The Pemaquid Peninsula, south of Damariscotta, is one of the most scenically rewarding stretches of the Mid-Coast — a long finger of land reaching into the Gulf of Maine with a dramatic rocky tip at Pemaquid Point where one of the most photographed lighthouses in New England stands above wave-scored granite ledges. The swirling patterns of the metamorphic rock at Pemaquid Point, created by ancient geological forces and polished smooth by millennia of surf, are beautiful in themselves and have attracted painters for generations. The Pemaquid Lighthouse is the image reproduced on the Maine quarter issued by the U.S. Mint. The Colonial Pemaquid State Historic Site, nearby, preserves the remains of a 17th-century English settlement and fort and offers an excellent small museum on the archaeology and history of this early colonial outpost.
Rockland, once a working lime-processing and fishing city and now reinvented as one of the most culturally vibrant small cities in Maine, is home to the Farnsworth Art Museum — one of the finest regional art museums in the United States, with a collection overwhelmingly focused on Maine and Maine-connected artists. The Wyeth Center, housed in a converted church adjacent to the main museum, holds the largest and most important collection of works by Andrew Wyeth outside of the Brandywine Museum in Pennsylvania, including major paintings drawn from his Maine summers in Cushing. N.C. Wyeth’s and Jamie Wyeth’s work is also extensively represented. The Farnsworth’s permanent collection also includes important works by Fitz Henry Lane, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Louise Nevelson — a Rockland native — and Winslow Homer, among many others.
For a city of fewer than 8,000 people, Rockland’s cultural infrastructure is remarkable.
Rockland is also the hub for ferry service to three of Maine’s most rewarding island destinations — Vinalhaven, North Haven, and Matinicus. Vinalhaven, the largest, is a working fishing community with a year-round population of about 1,200 that swells significantly in summer. Its combination of working waterfront character, excellent hiking on the island’s interior quarrying and forest trails, and the extraordinary clarity of the swimming holes in the old granite quarries — filled with fresh water and surrounded by vertical rock walls — make it one of the most rewarding island day trips or overnight visits in Maine. North Haven is smaller and slightly more exclusive, with a strong tradition of summer families and an excellent inn. Matinicus, 22 miles offshore — the most remote inhabited island on the Maine coast — is reached by a small plane or an occasional ferry and offers a glimpse of island life of almost radical self-sufficiency.
Camden, a few miles north of Rockland, is perhaps the most conventionally picturesque harbor town on the Maine coast — its inner harbor filled with windjammers and pleasure craft, backed by the dramatic wooded summits of the Camden Hills. Camden Hills State Park offers hiking to Mount Battie, whose summit is accessible both by trail and by a paved toll road and offers panoramic views over Penobscot Bay and its islands that are among the finest coastal vistas in New England. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay grew up in nearby Rockland and wrote her celebrated poem “Renascence” about these hills and this view.
The Maine Windjammer fleet, operating from Camden, Rockport, and Rockland, is one of the great sailing traditions of the American coast. A dozen or more historic schooners — wooden vessels built between the 1870s and the 1940s, several of them National Historic Landmarks — offer multi-day sailing cruises among the islands of Penobscot Bay, carrying passengers who help with the sails if they wish or simply watch the coast and islands slide by from a deck chair. A windjammer cruise of three to six days — anchoring each night in a different cove or harbor, eating meals cooked on a wood-fired galley stove, watching the stars from a rocking deck — is one of the most distinctive and deeply pleasurable travel experiences available anywhere in the United States.
Downeast Maine: Wild and Remote
East of Acadia, the character of the Maine coast shifts decisively. The tourist infrastructure thins, the roads narrow, the forests press closer, and the communities become smaller, harder, and more deeply rooted in the fishing and working traditions that have defined this coast for centuries. This is Downeast Maine — Washington County and the reaches toward the Canadian border — and it rewards the traveler willing to leave the well-beaten coastal path.
Deer Isle and Stonington, connected to the mainland by a graceful suspension bridge, constitute one of the most distinctive communities on the Maine coast. Stonington, at the island’s southern tip, is an active lobstering port of considerable character — its harbor crowded with working boats, its streets lined with modest but proud houses and a handful of shops and galleries. The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, on a hillside above the water nearby, is one of the most respected craft schools in the world, offering intensive summer workshops in fiber arts, blacksmithing, ceramics, printmaking, and related disciplines in studios that cascade dramatically down the hillside toward the sea. The work produced here by resident artists and workshop participants is of consistently high quality and can be found in galleries throughout the region.
Lubec, the easternmost town in the continental United States, sits at the mouth of Cobscook Bay across a narrow channel from Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada. The town is quiet, small, and possessed of a stark, weathered beauty appropriate to its position at the edge of the country. The West Quoddy Head Light, a distinctive candy-striped lighthouse at the easternmost point of the continental United States, stands above headlands that look across the Bay of Fundy toward the New Brunswick coast. The tidal range here — among the highest in the world at 18 to 24 feet — creates dramatic displays of exposed mudflat and rockweed at low tide and turbulent tidal currents in the narrows. Campobello Island, just across the international bridge from Lubec, is the site of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s summer cottage — a large shingled house preserved as an international park jointly administered by the United States and Canada, offering a fascinating window into Roosevelt’s early life and his complex relationship with this particular landscape.
Eastport, a small city on Moose Island connected to the mainland by a causeway, claims the title of easternmost city in the United States and occupies a position of extraordinary scenic drama — surrounded on three sides by the waters of Passamaquoddy Bay, with views across to the Canadian shore and to the islands of the bay. The city’s downtown, a compact collection of 19th-century brick commercial buildings on Water Street, has been undergoing slow but genuine revitalization, with artists, craftspeople, and small entrepreneurs drawn by low property costs and the extraordinary quality of the surrounding environment. The tides in Eastport are among the highest in North America, and the sight of a 20-foot tidal rise and fall — boats that floated above the dock at high tide resting on the bottom at low — is a spectacle that never loses its power to astonish.
The Western Mountains and Lakes
Inland Maine is less visited than the coast but offers its own profound pleasures, particularly for those drawn to mountains, lakes, fishing, paddling, and the deep quiet of a North Woods forest.
Sebago Lake, about 20 miles northwest of Portland, is Maine’s second largest lake and the source of Portland’s exceptionally clean municipal water supply. Its southern shore has been a summer resort destination since the Victorian era, and the town of Naples at the northern end of Long Lake — connected to Sebago by a navigable waterway — offers a pleasant and unpretentious lakeside resort atmosphere. Sebago Lake State Park provides excellent swimming, camping, and fishing access on the lake’s northern shore.
The Oxford Hills and Rangeley Lakes region, in western Maine, is a landscape of considerable grandeur — a high plateau of forested hills, cold trout lakes, and ski mountains that stretches toward the New Hampshire border. Rangeley itself, a small town on the shores of Rangeley Lake, has been a celebrated fishing destination since the late 19th century, when the exceptional brook trout fishing in the surrounding waters attracted sportsmen from across the eastern seaboard. The fishing tradition continues, and fly fishing on the Rangeley chain of lakes and the Rapid River remains among the finest in the eastern United States.
Sugarloaf, Maine’s largest ski resort, rises above the Carrabassett Valley in the western mountains and offers the only above-treeline skiing east of the Rockies — a broad, steep summit cone exposed to weather but delivering extraordinary views and challenging terrain when conditions cooperate. The resort’s vertical drop of 2,820 feet is the second largest in the eastern United States, and its combination of expert terrain, consistent snowfall from its high elevation, and a pleasant base village makes it a destination of genuine quality for serious skiers. Sunday River, near Bethel in the Oxford Hills, is the state’s other major ski destination — less dramatic in its setting than Sugarloaf but highly developed, with exceptional snowmaking, diverse terrain across eight interconnected peaks, and an extensive base village infrastructure.
The North Woods and the Allagash
The northern third of Maine is unlike anything in the more populated parts of New England — a wilderness of lakes, rivers, bogs, and boreal forest covering millions of acres, much of it privately owned by timber companies but accessible to outdoor recreation under a tradition of public access that is fundamental to Maine’s outdoor culture. This is the territory of moose, black bear, loon, and brook trout, of logging roads stretching for hundreds of miles without encountering a paved surface, of lakes so remote that the sound of a loon call carries for miles across still water.
Baxter State Park, donated to the people of Maine by former governor Percival Baxter in a series of land transfers between 1930 and 1962, encompasses 209,000 acres of wilderness surrounding Katahdin — the highest peak in Maine at 5,269 feet and the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Katahdin is one of the great mountain experiences in the eastern United States — a massif of extraordinary scale and grandeur, its broad summit plateau ringed by dramatic ridges, its approaches requiring genuine mountain experience and respect for rapidly changing weather. The Knife Edge, a narrow arête connecting Baxter Peak to Pamola Peak across a ridge that is in places only two or three feet wide with thousand-foot drops on either side, is one of the most dramatic and exhilarating ridge walks in the eastern United States. Baxter State Park is managed under a strict wilderness mandate — no electrical hookups, limited vehicle access, quiet hours enforced, a carry-in carry-out policy — that preserves a quality of wildness increasingly rare in accessible wilderness areas.
The Allagash Wilderness Waterway, a 92-mile canoe route following a chain of lakes and rivers through the heart of the North Woods to its confluence with the St. John River, is one of the classic wilderness paddling routes in the eastern United States. The route typically takes seven to ten days to complete and requires portaging around several sets of rapids, camping in lean-tos or on open sites along the waterway, and self-sufficient travel through a landscape almost entirely free of development. The experience of paddling the Allagash — the silence broken only by loons, the night sky blazing above the lake surface, the smell of wood smoke from a campfire on a gravel bar — is one of the definitive Maine experiences and one of the finest canoe trips available anywhere in the country.
Moosehead Lake, the largest lake in Maine and one of the largest in the eastern United States, sits at the edge of the North Woods in Piscataquis County. The town of Greenville, at its southern tip, serves as the gateway to an enormous territory of lakes, rivers, and forests to the north. Moose watching — Maine has the densest moose population in the contiguous United States, with an estimated 70,000 to 75,000 animals — is a primary attraction, and guided moose safaris operating out of Greenville and the surrounding area offer excellent opportunities for close encounters with these magnificent and improbable-looking animals, particularly in the early morning and evening hours of late spring and early summer.
Lobster: Maine’s Defining Food
No article about Maine travel is complete without addressing the lobster, which is not merely a food here but a cultural symbol, an economic foundation, and the organizing principle of an entire working waterfront civilization that has persisted for more than three centuries.
Maine lobstermen work under a system of informal territorial rights and formal state regulation that has produced one of the more sustainably managed fisheries in the world. The state’s roughly 5,000 active lobster license holders set and haul traps from vessels ranging from small outboards to 40-foot lobster boats, working year-round in waters that are challenging and sometimes dangerous.
The culture of the lobstering community — its independence, its physical toughness, its complex social codes — is one of the most distinctive in America and is being documented and celebrated by writers and filmmakers with increasing urgency as the industry faces pressures from climate change, shifting lobster range, and economic consolidation.
For the visitor, lobster is available in essentially every form from virtually every coastal town. The classic Maine lobster pound experience — a waterfront shack where you select a live lobster from the tank, watch it cooked in a massive steamer, and eat it at a picnic table with drawn butter, coleslaw, and a cold beer while the harbor traffic moves past — is one of the great American eating experiences, simple and perfect. Thurston’s Lobster Pound on Bass Harbor, Red’s Eats in Wiscasset — famous for its lobster rolls stuffed with the meat of an entire lobster — Harraseeket Lunch and Lobster in South Freeport, and dozens of others are celebrated institutions. The lobster roll itself, Maine’s signature sandwich, exists in two fundamental forms: the Maine style, served cold with mayonnaise in a toasted top-split hot dog bun, and the Connecticut style, served warm with drawn butter. In Maine, the cold version is the orthodoxy, though both have their passionate defenders.
Lighthouses, Maritime History, and the Working Coast
Maine has more than 60 lighthouses still standing along its coast, more than any other state in the Northeast, and they range from the easily accessible to the dramatically remote. The Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth, commissioned by George Washington in 1791 and one of the oldest lighthouses in the United States, stands above Casco Bay in a park setting of considerable beauty and is among the most visited and photographed in the country. The Pemaquid Point Light, as noted, is equally celebrated for its dramatic geological setting. The West Quoddy Head Light is historically significant as the easternmost lighthouse in the country. Many lighthouses are now operated as museums, bed and breakfasts, or vacation rental properties — staying the night in a lighthouse keeper’s house on a remote island is an experience available in Maine that is available almost nowhere else.
The Maine coast’s working maritime traditions extend well beyond lobstering. Commercial fishing for groundfish, shrimp, scallops, urchins, and clams continues in many ports. The seaweed harvesting industry — sustainable cultivation of kelp and other marine algae — has emerged as a significant new sector, with Maine at the forefront of American aquaculture innovation. Oyster farming in the sheltered estuaries of the Damariscotta River and other mid-coast waterways has produced some of the most celebrated oysters in the country — Glidden Point, Pemaquid, and Dodge Cove oysters are served in the finest seafood restaurants from New York to San Francisco.
Arts, Literature, and the Maine Imagination
Maine has inspired an extraordinary body of American art and literature — a cultural harvest disproportionate to its population that reflects the power of its landscape to provoke the imagination.
Winslow Homer, who settled at Prouts Neck on the Cape Elizabeth coast south of Portland in 1883 and worked there until his death in 1910, produced at this remote location some of the greatest paintings in American art — seascapes of a ferocity and formal grandeur that transformed the possibilities of the medium. His studio at Prouts Neck, preserved by the Portland Museum of Art, is open for tours and offers a moving encounter with the specific place from which these paintings emerged.
Andrew Wyeth, who spent his summers in Cushing on the St. George Peninsula and whose tempera paintings of the local landscape — most famously the Olson farm and its surroundings, the setting of Christina’s World — constitute one of the most sustained and serious explorations of a particular place in American art. The Olson House, preserved by the Farnsworth Museum, is open for visits.
E.B. White, who moved to a saltwater farm on the Blue Hill Peninsula in 1938, wrote some of his finest essays about Maine — the tidal cycle, the county fair, the working rhythms of a farming and fishing community — in addition to producing Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little at this same desk overlooking Penobscot Bay. The connection between place and work could not be more direct.
Stephen King, Maine’s most commercially successful writer and one of its most devoted residents, has set much of his fiction in the fictional Maine communities of Castle Rock and Derry, and his actual hometown of Bangor appears as a character in several of his novels. His Victorian mansion in Bangor, with its elaborate spider-web iron fence, is a pilgrimage destination for fans and a genuine piece of the city’s architectural fabric.
Practical Travel Information
Portland International Jetport is the state’s primary commercial airport, served by most major carriers with direct flights to numerous northeastern and mid-Atlantic cities, Chicago, Atlanta, and seasonal destinations beyond. Bangor International Airport serves the northern part of the state. Boston Logan, about two hours south of Portland by highway, offers considerably more flight options for those willing to drive.
A car is essentially indispensable for exploring Maine beyond Portland. The state is large, the distances between destinations significant, and the public transportation infrastructure minimal outside the cities. The Maine Turnpike (Interstate 95) runs from the New Hampshire border to Augusta before becoming Interstate 95 north to Bangor. US Route 1 follows the coast from Kittery to Calais at the Canadian border — its entire length is a designated scenic byway and, taken in sections, it is one of the great American coastal drives, threading through every coastal town and village from the South Coast to Downeast.
Lodging ranges from basic motels and campgrounds — Maine’s state park camping is excellent and reservations are essential for summer weekends — to inns and bed and breakfasts of high quality throughout the coastal region, to the luxury of several outstanding resort hotels. The Claremont Hotel on Mount Desert Island, the Samoset Resort in Rockport, the White Barn Inn in Kennebunkport, and the Inn by the Sea in Cape Elizabeth are among the state’s finest lodging properties. Cottage rentals by the week are the traditional Mid-Coast and island accommodation, and the stock of well-situated rental properties is extensive.
Timing matters enormously in Maine. July and August are peak season — warm, beautiful, and genuinely crowded in the most popular destinations. Bar Harbor in particular can feel overwhelmed in high summer, with cruise ships adding thousands of day visitors to the regular tourist load. June and September are superior months for most purposes — the weather is excellent, the crowds significantly reduced, the foliage beginning in September, and the light of early autumn particularly beautiful on the water. October brings spectacular foliage to the interior and western mountains and a quality of golden coastal light that has made it a favorite of photographers and painters for generations.
Final Thoughts
Maine is a state that has been attracting devoted visitors for nearly two centuries, and the devotion it inspires is of an unusually persistent and specific character. People return to Maine the way they return to places that have gotten into their bones — not because it is the most convenient destination or the most glamorous, but because it offers something that is genuinely difficult to find elsewhere and genuinely difficult to name precisely.
It is something in the quality of the light on the water in the early morning, the sound of the foghorn, the smell of low tide and spruce and wood smoke. It is in the directness and dry humor of the people, the beauty of the working waterfront, the extraordinary cleanness of the cold water. It is in the scale of the wilderness and the intimacy of the harbors, the persistence of traditions that the rest of the country has largely abandoned, and the particular clarity of air and thought that a landscape of such uncomplicated elemental beauty seems to produce.
Come for a long weekend and you will want a week. Come for a week and you will understand why so many people have found ways to come back every summer for the rest of their lives. Maine is not a destination that exhausts itself in a single visit. It is, as its slogan suggests and its most devoted visitors know from long experience, the way life should be — which is to say, it is a place that reminds you what matters and how it feels when the world is as beautiful as it can be.