Kids at Mt. Apatite in Auburn. (BDN photos by Seth Koenig)
With nearly 3,500 miles of scenic shoreline — more than all but two other states — it’s no wonder tourists spend much of their time up and down the Maine coast, at places like Bar Harbor, Portland and Old Orchard Beach.
There are lighthouses and fresh lobster along the coast. It’s great.
But as travel writer Malerie Yolen-Cohen wrote in a recent piece for the Huffington Post, there’s more to Maine than just the coastline. Yolen-Cohen, who specializes in finding “offbeat escapes,” listed what the Post titled 17 “best attractions in Maine’s inland cities.”
She urges travelers to tour the Rancourt & Co. handmade shoe factory in Lewiston, visit the downtown shops of Hallowell and stroll across the historic Two-Cent Bridge in Waterville’s Head of Falls Park, for instance.
Among the other places listed were:
- Auburn’s Mt. Apatite, a hard-to-find former mining site turned do-it-yourself gem-finding park.
- Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, the last surviving — and dwindling — community of religious Shakers in America.
- Augusta’s Old Fort Western, which was built in 1754 and is the country’s oldest original wooden garrison.
- The Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, boasting the works of Winslow Homer, Auguste Renoir and Norman Rockwell, among many others.
- Friars’ Bakehouse in Bangor, run by, as Yolen-Cohen writes, “actual frock-wearing Friars, from a cloister nearby.”
