Compass American Guides: Maine, 3rd Edition (Full-color Travel Guide) - Softcover

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Introduction

This book is written for travelers of an independent frame of mind, who are willing to take an occasional risk and stray from the beaten paths -- and in mid-summer Maine, some of them can be very well beaten indeed. If your time is very limited, it may make sense to take a package tour or hit the obvious spots. But if there is even one day to spare, I hope to lure you away from the U.S. Route 1 and I-95 corridor and the overcrowded resorts -- one almost indistinguishable now from another -- and to introduce you to a state many of whose most interesting features are barely known to the tourist indusrty.

The basic framework of this book consists of a series of itineraries which reflect the shape of the land. In the case of Maine, the best way to perceive this land is not as a coastal strip edging a huge, unexplored back country, but as a series of great river valleys reaching into the heart of the Northland, connecting the interior and the sea. This is the way the early French and British explorers saw the country, and the route the earliest settlers took in search of timber and farmland. The Piscataqua, the Androscoggin, the Kennebec, the Penobscot, and the St. Croix rivers flow through the forests and mountains of western and northern Maine, then meet the Atlantic along the state's legendary rocky shore. These are not simply rivers of great beauty but keys to understanding the land and people of Maine.