Portland is the food and drink capital of New England and is often cited as having the most restaurants per capita in the US. Bon Apetite magazine named it America’s 2018 Restaurant City of the Year. If you’re making the trip to Portland, and want to try out some of it’s more popular restaurants, make reservations well in advance because many of them get fully booked months in advance. Below, we outline a relatively reservation free walking trip through Portland starting with coffee and donuts in the morning and ending with late night cocktails. The itinerary below traces the steps of our first trip together when we ate and drank our way through Portland, and we fell in love. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
Acadia National Park is great for a day of relaxed site-seeing and beach lounging or an active trip of hiking trails and up mountains and even camping. It's a National Park that inhabits most of a big island (Mt. Desert Island), has the tallest mountain on the Eastern seaboard (and is the first place in the US to see the sunrise each morning), is filled with rock formations like Thunder Hole, and it's beaches have fine sand (unlike most beaches in Maine which are rocky). Bar Harbor is a fun town with plenty of shopping, seafood, and is a port for whale and puffin watching. If you have time, this is a must-do when coming to Maine. Enjoy!
Knox County is home to two of Maine's most beautiful towns: Rockland and Camden. Just 20 minutes up the coast from Belfast (where the wedding is), this area offers good food, great art, antiquing, shopping, history, hiking, sailing, and cultural events. It's also where lobster is king - Rockland is home to the Maine Lobster Festival. Missy, Tim, friends and family ran the 2018 lobster festival 10k, and of course, Missy won! (Tim finished a respectful not last place). Hike Mt. Battie for an incredible view of the bay. Explore Fort Knox and learn about the history of the area. Gallery hop through Rockland and stop in the Maine Art Museum. Shop in Camden and take home a pice of Maine or check out what's playing at the Camden Opera House or Rockland film forum.
This is the area we suggest you stay (check out our recommendations page). Belfast is where the wedding and reception are, and the area is central to many of the other recommended activities and places to visit. The area is only a 15 minute drive to the Friday Field Day Festivities! Main street in Belfast is only a few blocks long, but is home to enough restaurants to feed you for an entire vacation of dining out. Take a walk over the footbridge over the Belfast harbor. Go antiquing in Northport and stop in the Farnesworth history museum. You'll be served lobster at the wedding, but it's worth a second lobster dinner at the Lobster Pound that has the most beautiful views of the sunset in the area. Run the hills of Northport along the bay, golf, or go have fun at a seance at the Northport Mystic summer colony! Take the ferry from Lincolnville to Isleboro and bike around the island or explore the rocky coast. Eat rabbit or venison at the traditional American restaurant Youngstown Inn.
If you're flying into Portland, Maine's largest airport, we recommend staying a night there and checking out one of our favorite cities (see recommendation #1 above). On your way to Belfast (where we recommend staying), you can take the fast route along the Maine Tournpike (I-95) or you can take the long scenic way and travel along route 1 through some of the most picturesque towns in the world. Go shopping at the outlets and the LL Bean Store in Freeport or stop in at the weird geological structure of the Dessert of Maine. Go eat oysters right out of Damarascotta Bay. Maine’s best lobster roll is from a shack in the quaint town of Wiscassett. Take a puffin tour out of Boothbay. The towns at the end of this trip, just south of Belfast, are Rockland and Camden - which you can spend a whole day or two in and we’ve written out recommendations for them in #3.
For the adventurous, this is place to be - hiking, kyacking, camping, swimming, and more. But this other-worldy adventure can be done floating on lake-tours, stopping at roadside restaurants, taking moose-watching tours, and driving around the tallest mountain in Maine, Mt. Katahdin.
We'll be adding more recommendations over the year to make this the best trip possible!