Biking the Coast of Maine!

      "Explore Maine by Bike" is a fantastic spiral-bound book of 33 loop bicycle rides. You can pick up a free copy at any Maine information center along the highway, it's published by the Maine DOT.
 

   My bicycling friend, Rose and I started at Portland's Back Cove at 6:30am. We started along the Eastern Trail but missed a turn and ended up riding through the streets. The trail signage is small and some signs were faded but it was early enough that the traffic was negligible. We were following Tour 14 - Portland-Cape Elizabeth- Lighthouses, about a 52 mile loop.

We rode around the Eastern Prom, then over the Casco Bay Bridge and out to our first stop at Bug Light.

  

Onto Portland Head Light, it was pretty foggy so not much of a view, the tolling of the bell was pretty loud.

  

All along the way we had great Maine coast views.

     

On the way to Prouts Neck, we saw this amazing stone house.

Looks right out of a Winslow Homer painting.

  

Tri-colored Heron (taken in Florida)

    At the point where we would have looped back north to Portland, we side-tracked to the Scarborough Marsh (I always pack my binoculars). Lots of shorebirds (forgot to take pictures) in the marsh along with a tri-colored heron, a bird not usually seen there.

    We continued to the Portland Greenbelt biking/walking paved trail. This took us back and we recrossed the Casco Bay bridge into Portland. Here we found the Eastern Prom Trail that had eluded us on the way down. We followed this back to the Back Cove.

   Another biker on the trail told us that rte 1 north had a wide breakdown lane and that would take us to Falmouth so we kept going. We stopped at Maine Audubon's Gilsland Farm for a break.

Bedstraw Hawkmoth caterpillar was crossing the driveway at Gilsland Farm.

 

     We kept going along route 88, which took us through Falmouth Foreside, then turned back to our friends house in Portland. We rode 65.5 miles and stopped at Beal's for a frozen treat!