With this in mind, I wonder: Is it possible to visit this carnival town and come away with a positive impression? The answer, you’ll be surprised to learn, is yes. Here’s how you can experience it too.
All aboard
Asking around, I hear that the key to classing up any visit to OOB is riding the Downeaster train. To test this theory, my sister, Kay-Lee, and I book two round-trip tickets. We drive to the station in Portland and arrive just before 8 am. (We would have preferred to leave the car at home, but since the Portland train station is located on a highway off-ramp, requiring walkers and bikers to risk life and limb crossing 27 lanes of traffic without the aid of a sidewalk, we did the sensible thing and drove.) We get out of our car and hop right on the train. No lines, no waiting.
It seems like as soon as we take our seats the full train pulls away from the station. (Now when traveling to Boston, it’s a good move to upgrade to business class. But on the ride to OOB there isn’t time to open a book, let alone flip around your seat or plug in a laptop, so we went coach and saved a few bucks.)
By 8:15 am (in less time than it takes to drive from Portland) we’re standing in OOB looking at a yellow building that I’d always assumed was a train station. Don’t be fooled. This is actually a candy shop and the Chamber of Commerce, which operates an info center and a clean bathroom. However, neither is open.
In need of a bathroom, we wander down to the strip. (Nothing much is open here either, but for some strange reason it’s possible to buy a hot dog and a whoopie pie at this ungodly hour.) We learn that those scary bathrooms down by the Pier that cost 25¢ to use are long gone. Instead the public bathrooms are now free and located across from the Pirate ship on West Grand Avenue.
At 8:30 in the morning these rest rooms are totally deserted and cleaner than we expect. (But beware, the full-length mirror adds at least 20 lbs.) Oddly enough, these bathrooms (and the ones at the Chamber) lack changing rooms, which seems like a fairly big oversight for a beach town.
Of course I’ve never noticed this during past jaunts to OOB, probably because I’ve either been visiting someone with a condo or I’ve driven my car (which doubles as a semi-private changing room in a pinch). I’ll cut the town a little slack, seeing as the Downeaster is a relatively new phenomenon and they probably haven’t had much time to figure out how to accommodate car-less and condo-less day trippers.
Seeing the sights
Since most of the shops don’t open until 9 am and the Palace Playground arcade doesn’t open until 10 am (with the rides starting up at noon), it’s a good idea to grab a coffee and cool your jets for awhile. Good choices in this pursuit are Beach Bagels on Old Orchard Street and Dolce Crema Caffe on East Grand Avenue. Both offer hot drinks and baked goods, while Beach Bagels adds in omelettes and sandwiches and Dolce serves up gelato and sorbetto.
Next it’s time to do a little shopping. Since we’re on the anti-honky-tonk tour, we avoid the shops selling things like short shorts with Hooters emblazoned on the butt and knifes that look like they’re straight out of a psycho killer movie. One shop we highly recommend is Expressly Trends on East Grand Avenue. Here you can find everything from cute dresses to madras shorts, and all at very reasonable prices.
With shopping fatigue setting in, we head for the beach a little before 10 am. Only the die-hard beach-goers have staked their claims at this hour, so we get the pick of all the prime spots. We unpack our towels, strip down to our bathing suits and slather on the sunscreen.
Then we stroll down to the water’s edge. No surprise here — the water is bone-chilling. My ankles literally ache from the cold, but we manage to wade up to our thighs before retreating to the warmth of our encampment. We lay motionless absorbing as much of the solar warmth as we can.
Everything is swell until the beach begins to fill up. Soon two middle-aged women plop themselves down not far from us and one of them decides this would be a perfect time to light up. Her cigarette smoke drifts our way and helps explains why this gorgeous strip of sand has more cigarette butts per square inch than any other beach in Maine.
Finding food
Pushed off the beach by the fumes, we look for a place to eat an early lunch. Our first instinct is to head to the Pier Patio Pub at the end of the Pier, where the food may be mediocre but the views can’t be beat. It’s 10:50 when we wander up to the entrance, and it’s closed.
We ask an employee when it will open and she tells us 11. So we wait. And we wait. Eleven am comes and goes and at about quarter past we decide to try our luck elsewhere.
As part of our mission is to avoid the greasy pizza/french fries/fried dough that is so ubiquitous on the strip (and probably explains why so many of the people who frequent this town are one hamburger away from a heart attack), we take the non-opening Patio Pub as a sign that better food lurks elsewhere.
We consider Chrys’s Restaurant, with its Greek menu of gyros, mousaka, dolmathes and hummus with pita bread, but keep walking because we’d like to have a better view. We also contemplate Bayside Pita Wraps, which offers both a hummus pita and a garden pita, but since this is a purely take-out operation (read: you can’t order a drink), we keep on walking.
We find ourselves at Ole’ JJ’s on West Grand Avenue, where our window seats give us a full view of all the amusement park rides. This Mexican eatery is exactly what we need. The staff kindly makes me a vegetarian taco bowl (even though it’s not on the menu) and my sister scores a (very strong) margarita.
We finish and still have an hour before the train arrives. Seizing the opportunity we duck into the arcade where we play a couple games of ski-ball and then we head back down to the now crowded beach. As far as I can tell, the water is as cold as before, but my sister braves the icy waves and jumps in for swim. Finally it’s time to head back to the train platform.
The best way to get there is to walk through the Wiggle Weigle bookstore, where there are lots of great buys. Once we exit the back door, it’s just a short walk to the train. The train is 10 minutes late, which isn’t bad considering it’s coming all the way from Boston. (If the train was seriously late, I have no idea how you would find out since this is an unattended station.)
Back in Portland, we feel proud to have avoided the bad food, the bad parking and the badly dressed (well, we did see a few fashion don’ts, but nothing enormously shocking), while getting in both beach time and arcade time. It’s quite a feat. And for that, we thank the Downeaster. Now if they could just work on making the Portland train station less of a death trap for pedestrians, life would be perfect.