Ten days ago, we spent the weekend in Portland, Maine. We loved the Headlight park on Cape Elizabeth. This is typically the kind of landscape that makes me want to live in exile from society.
Maine is known as the Lighthouse State, there are more than 60 along the coast. Thee are 5 of them just in Portland. Two great projects I really need to consider when I retire:
- going on a tour along the New England coast to take pictures of all the lighthouse, starting in Rhode Island, and going up north until the Canadian border. He! that’s fun. Most of them are closed to the public, but the really chic thing to do it to see the view.
- sleeping in a lighthouse. I can completely picture it: blue and white stripes pillows, sandals, spiral staircase and picnic with rosé wine in front of my temporary house. I could do it in some of them, even if it’s pretty pricey and it would require to book in advance. (see here Little River Lighthouse, or there Pemaquid Point Light).
Lighthouse are such clichés:
- they always look like postcards.
- they always look romantic. The path along the rock is narrow and dangerous, it smells like ocean, and we feel small facing all this immensity. 100% cliché.
- they are quintessential spooky-ness, specially on a day like that when the weather was threatening (pretty word to say cold and rainy). And Maine is pretty spooky by itself, don’t forget that it’s Stephen King home State. I can feel why he was inspired by these kind of landscapes.
On Cape Elizabeth, there are tons of big houses facing the sea. How cool it that! And knowing that Bette Davis and John Ford makes it even better.
We should start a collection of lighthouse pictures, we’ve seen a few on the East and West coast:
- In Acadia Park, up North Maine
- In Boston! Believe me, there’s a tiny lighthouse in the harbor. We saw it last year while visiting the Boston Harbor Islands.
- In California, at the very end of Pointe Reyes.
We went to Portland by bus, from Boston. We didn’t take our bikes, so to go to the headlight, we did a tour on a trolley. I highly recommend it, because the walk to the cape would be very long. The poet Longfellow used to do it!
