Situated on Casco Bay, Portland is delightful. It’s a place where you get a hefty taste of New England.
Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow referred to these historic, quaint, lantern-lit streets and stylish architectural styles as a “Jewel of the Sea”.
Once off the ship we found ourselves heading towards the Old Port section of Portland (about a 5 minute walk). It reminded me of Main Street in Disneyland. Vendors lined the sidewalks with handmade arts and crafts while a horse drawn, tourists filled, wagon slowly meandered ..... up and down Commercial Street. We could not have imagined how ‘adorable’ this place could be. This is not meant to be pejorative however it’s like Disney Imagineers decided to brainstorm and come up a seaside port, cobblestone streets, creative boutiques, yummy restaurants and then hired the nicest people to interact with the tourists. We loved walking around this town.
I wanted to go Whale Watching (bucket list obligation) but Hurricane Irma in North Carolina was extending her high waves up and down the Atlantic coastline thus going to watch the large mammals breach in 15’ swells was out of the question on this trip.
We had to taste Maine lobster in Maine, so Dimillo’s looked like a good place to enjoy the crustaceans. It wasn’t. Our lobsters were way undercooked. The waitress was new so she told us that bread was not available. I was going to ask her how they made sandwiches but I felt it would be a lost cause. She didn’t know how to open a bottle of wine and once new customers came in she completely forgot about us. Lunch (1 bottle of Riesling, 2 undercooked ‘lazy’ lobsters and two small bowls of New England chowder), cost us over $150 and yes we did leave a nice tip. Oh well.
Lobster Trivia:
About 90% of the nation’s lobster supply is caught off the coast of Maine.
Lobsters have an average life span of 50 years.
A female lobster lays anywhere from several thousand to 100,000 eggs at a time. Only one-tenth of 1% of those eggs will develop and live past six weeks in the larva stage.
It takes a lobster four to seven years to grow to be one pound in weight.
A lobster can be right or left-handed. Some have the large crusher on the left, others on the right. They can drop a claw as a defense mechanism and grow another one.
Maine coastal waters have yielded as many as 100 million pounds of lobsters annually.