The next stop on our New England road trip was Portland, Maine! If you haven’t already seen our first stop, start here.
I had literally no expectations for Portland. I had done very little research (Shelby did most of the planning for this trip) and I was pleasantly surprised with how much I feel in love with this little city, considering we were only there a total of 24 hours. We managed to squeeze a lot in though.
Walking around I kept saying out loud how much the city looked and felt like Reykjavik. Or at least how I imagine Reykjavik looks in the fall (we were there in the spring).
We stayed at the Portland Regency Hotel. It has an unbeatable location and our room was lovely. I would highly recommend. They had fantastic pillows (I’m very picky) and they delivered a complimentary tray with fresh coffee and pastries to your room in the morning! That was a nice amenity.
We arrived in Portland in the early afternoon, and after checking into our hotel, we immediately headed out to explore the city. Right around the corner from our hotel was The Holy Donut, which was #1 on our must try food list. In fact, the food in Portland was so good (and we managed to eat a lot of it in just 24 hours) that we are dedicating a whole separate post just to the food very soon.
We walked around the city, went and had a late afternoon snack at Duckfat, and then decided to drive out to Cape Elizabeth (about 20 minutes outside of Portland) to see the beach and the lighthouse. Turns out, accessing the lighthouse was a little hard to figure out, so we ended up just walking around on a cliff overlooking the beach. at this point a cold front had just come through and it was very windy and chilly so we only lasted a few minutes before piling back into the car and heading back to Portland.
I haven’t been to that many beaches that are not sandy, so it was interesting to see the different landscape along the coast.
I had found this restaurant called Grace, which is inside a church, and it seemed like too cool of an experience to miss. It was really great, but more on that later : )
The next morning we headed back to The Holy Donut, this time picking up some extras for snacks during the next leg of our road trip.
Even though it was a little rainy, we spent the morning walking around Portland and popping into tons of cute little shops.
We stopped into Bard Coffee for a mid-morning coffee break (and a brief escape from the rain) before heading back to pack up and check out of the hotel.
We stopped at Otto for pizza on our way out of town. Seriously some of the best pizza we’ve ever had. And we live in New York City, the capital city of pizza.
Across the street from Otto was this old cemetery which was established in 1668! Our parents are really into genealogy, and love walking through cemeteries, so of course our Mom couldn’t resist taking a quick stroll.
After our creepy cemetery visit, we loaded back into the car and headed off to our next destination. We loved Portland and already can’t wait to go back for a longer stay! Stay tuned for more of our New England road trip travel diaries coming soon!
-Ash xx
It looks like such a cute little city to visit!