I have often blogged about my fondness for Portland, Maine—not only special as home of more than half of my grandchildren, but also because it's just such a cool little city.
Our recent late Christmas trip was mostly spent indoors with family stuff, but we did get out and about in Portland's Oldtown a few times.
Much as we were looking forward to snowy adventures, the weather didn't cooperate with the white stuff until just before we left. So I don't have winter-wonderland photos for you, just a few randomly interesting structures and objects we happened to see.
Like the handsome building you see above, across the street from a park where the kids enjoyed climbing on rocks and generally running off the sugar from their Standard Baking pastries. I was quite taken with this edifice; here's a closeup of some of its cute decorative elements:
A rather cool thing about the park where we played, in addition to the rocks, were a couple of these at first mysterious post-boxes (it is Post Office Park):
I was immediately reminded of the post-boxes in London, and how you can tell under whose reign they were erected (see one at the bottom of this post). But the Asian characters were a puzzle...
...for a few minutes, anyway, until we saw this plaque (and you'll notice I was able to sneak a pic of Oldest Granddaughter into the story).
I saw another informational plaque down by the harbor when we went to one of our favorite eateries.
Portland has been welcoming to folks escaping from bad situations for a long, long, time, and the tradition continues with their embrace of refugees from many recent conflicts. Like I said, a really nice city!
No comments:
Post a Comment