I took this photo in the summer of 2002, when I went up to Hancock, near Mt. Desert Island, to stay with George and his family for the weekend. I had been up to Maine a few other times in the previous year, visiting George twice in Bangor as he did his clerkship, and also checking out Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport.

I think Hancock represents the furthest-north point in Maine I’ve been to, but over the years, starting with Scott’s college-hunting trip in the early ’90s, I’ve visited Brunswick, Waterville, Lewiston, Rockport, Freeport, Bath, Camden, and, of course, Portland. It’s always nice to get up to Maine, which felt to me the most like Alaska of any place I’d been to in the Lower 48, beautiful and remote and mostly empty. In Alaska, there’s no 24-hour L.L. Bean flagship store, where you can return your eight year-old backpack because the zipper finally broke and walk out with a brand-new one, and there are no roadside dairy barns and lobster shacks, but still, there are some similarities. Portland always seemed like a nice alternative to Boston when thinking about places to live on the East Coast, a city in the context of Maine, but a pretty small and pleasant one. Aimee and I had a couple of nice weekend trips to Portland, and it never failed to be a great destination.