Goose Rocks Beach, Maine

The view from my desk

Goose Rocks Beach really does not want you to know that it is here. There are no neon signs indicating its presence from the highway (Route 9). There are a few wooden signs in the shape of arrows with various commercial enterprises on the main road leading into the community, but it is easy to miss, as evidenced by my attempt to find it a couple of weeks ago on the Thelma and Louise trip. We blew right by it.  GRB has a Kennebunkport mailing address, but all they really share is a zip code.  Goose Rocks Beach has a small town sweetness,  hundreds of summer cottages, all tightly packed on quiet, bike filled streets. The toddlers can ride their trikes and the teens their bikes. And ringed by the prize, a three mile stretch of soft sandy beach featuring your friend and mine, the Atlantic Ocean.  The beach is lined with a variety of ocean front manses from ostentatious new builds to old cottages and behind them the houses that have grown vertically to get a view of the blue. That's where I am...on the third floor of a year-round residence rental (as opposed to a cottage) looking out a porthole window at the sea. "Sixty yards from the beach," as advertised.

During one of my stays in nearby Biddeford Pool I discovered the Goose Rocks Beach Community Center, which has four lovely tennis courts and an active group of players. It is run by an old former high school coach named Mike, whom everyone calls Coach. He was still there, even though we have been away for the past two summers, he pretended to remember me. Maybe he did. So did the tennis captain. There is a lot of continuity here, families who own houses and have been coming their entire lives, and many repeat renters, the kind who sign the lease for next summer the day they check out.

I started my day with the Tennis Round Robin which I know the GRBC hosts every Sunday at 9 a.m. And as the haze turned to sunshine, I hit the beach. There was a breeze coming off the ocean, there were kids throwing seaweed, playing paddle ball, building sand castles. All of the things you are supposed to see at the beach. They don't call it a day at the beach for nothing. I feel restored and refreshed and reminded of my childhood summers in Maine, when I used to sleep until noon and then spend the afternoon on the beach reading and writing.

This made us fforget the 11 hour drive

We are not going to discuss the eleven hour drive here because it all forgotten now. But we are going to discuss what our second stop was, after getting the keys from the realtor--O'Reilly's Lobster Coop. Much like Goose Rocks Beach, Mr. O'Reilly doesn't really want you to know he is there, and once you arrive, he will amble into the pound when he is good and ready while the customers look longingly at the crustaceans fated to die for their enjoyment. One year Frank and Jane Beiser visited and tried to photograph Mr. O'Reilly and his establishment and he didn't allow it. But Peter snuck in this one:

O'Reilly's: What else matters?