1. Winslow Memorial Park
City: Freeport, ME
Category: Parks & Recreation
Telephone: (207) 865-4198
Address: Staples Point Rd.
Description: What a find this 90-acre park is. Owned by the town of Freeport, it has stupendous views of the Harraseeket River and Casco Bay and its islands, and there’s a small tidal beach that makes for good swimming. (Get here two hours before or after high tide.) The facilities include picnic areas large enough for groups, a nature trail, a boat launch site, and a playground. Good stuff and only minutes from all the shopping downtown. You can even set up camp in one of the 100 sites here if you bring your tent. Admission is $2 per person. Open Memorial Day weekend through Columbus Day.
2. L.L. Bean Outdoor Discovery Schools
City: Freeport, ME
Category: Parks & Recreation
Telephone: (888) 552-3261
Address: 3 Bow St.
Description: Who better to take you out sea kayaking than L.L. Bean, which practically invented the outdoors? As part of its Outdoor Discovery program, Bean provides half-, one-, and two-day kayak schools, as well as three-day trips on Casco Bay, where you’ll paddle in tandem kayaks by day, learning your way around the sport, and spend evenings at the company’s Casco Bay Island Base Camp ($475). Call or visit the outfitter’s excellent Web site for all of the options.
3. Mast Landing Sanctuary
City: Freeport, ME
Category: Parks & Recreation
Telephone: (207) 781-2330
Address: Upper Mast Landing Rd.
Description: An Audubon sanctuary, this 140-acre refuge is popular with walkers and nature lovers. There are 3.5 miles of trails that thread through open fields, apple orchards, hemlock forest, and alder lowlands, and Mill Stream pours over an old dam and mill site. The preserve was so named because the Royal Navy used to use it as a source for its ship masts. Today you’ll find few mast agents but a lot of songbirds and, if you visit in summer, a lot of schoolkids who go to a day camp here. Open sunrise to sunset.
City: Freeport, ME
Category: Parks & Recreation
Address: 425 Wolfe’s Neck Rd.
5. Harrington House
City: Freeport, ME
Category: Parks & Recreation
Telephone: (207) 865-3170
Address: 45 Main St.
Description: This circa 1830 Federal is the home of the local historical society’s gift shop, which is particularly well done. But so are the gardens of antique roses and perennials to be found outside it.
6. Pettengill Farm Gardens
City: Freeport, ME
Category: Parks & Recreation
Telephone: (207) 865-3170
Address: 45 Main St.
Description: Historic wild roses, lilacs, old-fashioned perennials, and cedars are among the draws at this 1810 saltbox in the state’s famous outlet village. Antique apple orchards, woods, and salt marshes sit on the 140 acres here, which border the Harraseeket River and are run by the local historical society.
7. Tidebrook Conservation Trust
City: Freeport, ME
Category: Parks & Recreation
Telephone: (207) 869-1012
Address: 38 Bartol Island Rd.
Description: A 45-acre conservation easement has allowed the gardens here to grow undisturbed, and the old orchards bloom with wildflowers, native and ornamental flowering shrubs, and the plantings of a more formal garden.