New Enland: Penobscot Bay and Portland, Maine

Bangor, Maine, is north of Penobscot Bay, one of the most picturesque stretches of the Maine coast. As we drove from Bangor to Portland on October 14, 2020, we could have spent a week on that bay, visiting rocky beaches and picturesque piers, artists’ colonies and lobster shacks.  Dave agreed to travel along Route 1, which followed the ocean, but he had no interest in pausing at the piers for either Rockland or Camden, two of the most charming towns on the bay.  Another time.

Dave did agree to stop at the Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine, just south of Penobscot Bay, on the Kennebuc River.  As he bought entrance tickets to the museum, Dave suggested, “Shall we take a boat trip, as well?”  Yes, yes, I agreed.  

The museum was wonderful, with exhibits on the once-booming Maine industry of cutting ice out of the river and selling it as far south as New York City; shipwrecks along the turbulent Maine coast; ice fishing; and local shipbuilding.  

Dave and I both enjoy boat rides, and this was the second of three we took on our trip to New England.  During this hour-long boat ride up and down the Kennebuc River, we sailed past the Bath Boat Yard, which still builds destroyers for the U.S. Navy.  We saw five destroyers under construction as we passed.

We also enjoyed the museum's collection of ships and boats from the 1700s and 1800s.

As we drove down the Maine coast, we stopped at L.L. Bean headquarters and factory store, a destination in itself.

We drove on to Portland, Maine, where we spent an hour at the highly rated Portland Art Museum.  We especially enjoyed an exhibit called “Mythmakers,” featuring the paintings of Winslow Homer and Frederick Remington.  The exhibit explained how those two painters, who never met each other and were a generation apart in age, both expressed post-Civil War myths about manhood and nature.  Both had been chroniclers of the Civil War, and both showed men heroically conquering nature.  For Winslow Homer, that meant conquering the sea, and for Remington, that meant prevailing over Indians in the West.  

We then drove down to the Portland pier, to Luke’s, a stylish seafood restaurant.  I snapped photos of boats bobbing right outside, after eating another lobster dinner.