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Spending the summer in Portland is pretty great, with our parks, hiking trails, and beaches within city limits or a short bike ride away.
But another wonderful thing about living here is our proximity to a lot of other great places in northern New England. 
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Since it's summertime, we've been seeing lots of visitors (on the web and in real life) from the broiling cities of southern New England and the mid-Atlantic.
If you're one of those people looking for a weekend getaway to the refreshingly mild, beachy shores of Casco Bay, here are a few travel tips from someone who makes the Portland-to-NYC trip pretty regularly.
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For centuries, Portland's working waterfront has delivered natural resources from the ocean to the city and the world beyond. Now, after several years of targeted research and development from the State of Maine and the private sector, Portland is emerging as a small hub for emerging renewable energy technologies that can harness some of the Gulf of Maine's fierce ocean energy to help power homes and businesses throughout New England.
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Last week, just in time for Independence Day, city and state dignitaries cut the ribbon on a new memorial to our veterans — one that does double-duty as a vital, more sustainable transportation connection across the harbor. Portland's new Veterans Memorial Bridge, which connects Portland's West End to the Ligonia and Cash Corner neighborhoods of South Portland across the Fore River and is now open to traffic of all kinds, is a handsome addition to the city's architecture.
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“In-state hires” is a phrase everybody can get behind, and it’s something that’s become a key philosophical practice for South Portland’s Fairchild Semiconductor. The trouble is, as everyone who’s seen Waiting for Superman knows, this country’s education system is facing a dire engineering crisis--Maine (and the country as a whole) simply isn’t producing the sort of science-savvy graduates that Fairchild is looking for.
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In a city filled with creative people, where do they purchase their supplies? For many artists (and students and parents and kids and teachers), the answer is Artist & Craftsman.
Located not on the peninsula but a short distance away, at Woodford’s Corner, Artist & Craftsman is northern New England’s largest art supplier.
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Portland's most heavily used greenspace (and probably its most loved) is not Deering Oaks. Nor the Eastern Prom nor Evergreen Cemetery.
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"Sous les pavés, la plage"
— Situationist graffiti, 1968
One of the best things about living in Portland in the summer is getting home from work at 5 p. m.
