Tramel's travel blog: Visiting Maine's Old Orchard Beach is a time machine

Maine has a time machine. It’s called Old Orchard Beach, and it takes you back to 1962. Back to when the world was young.

Trish the Dish and I stopped in Old Orchard Beach on Thursday and stepped back in time. To the days of old-fashioned amusement parks and long piers above the ocean and arcade games along the sand.

Maine has resort towns and Maine has beach towns. They are not the same.

Resort towns have a longer shelf life in the calendar. We were in Kennebunkport in October 2020, and it was a bustling, thriving place. We returned to Kennebunkport on Thursday, and it was the same, except more people, of course.

But two years ago in the autumn, we were in York and Old Orchard Beach, and they were mostly desolate. No surprise considering the weather was windy, rainy and about 48 degrees.

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Where is Kennebunkport, Maine?

Kennebunkport is between York and Old Orchard Beach on Maine’s southern coast.

Kennebunkport, like Bar Harbor and Camden up north, draws all kinds of visitors, but primarily they are the playgrounds of the wealthy. Pricey food, pricey accommodations, upscale shops.

Old Orchard Beach and York counter with something money can’t buy. An actual beach.

Most of Maine’s coast is rocky, including some tree-lined cliffs, with islands and inlets creating a beautiful setting but not much in the way of surf and sand.

But a few places offer the traditional sand scene, like Old Orchard Beach, with the coolest of names and the ultimate vintage vibe. Bar Harbor draws the rich and famous. Old Orchard Beach draws the middle class and obscure.

Whereas the Alabama and Florida hotbeds of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, Destin and Panama City, have sprouted long rows of high-rise condominiums and all the commerce that follows (new restaurants, children’s attractions, adventures from parasailing to whale watching), Old Orchard Beach remains rooted in the vacation style of 50 years ago.

A couple of high-rise condos have been built, but Old Orchard Beach’s miles-long sand shore is mostly accompanied by outdated motels and small house rentals from a bygone era.

Old Orchard Beach is so antiquated, it nearly makes the full circle back to charming. At its center sits a 500-foot pier out into the Atlantic, and the businesses leading to the pier are pizza stands and T-shirt shops reminiscent of a state fair.

The pier itself is from days of old. The first Old Orchard Beach pier extended 1,770 feet and was built of steel in 1898. A casino with ballroom was at the end of the pier. Over the years, storms and fire have required the pier to be rebuilt. It now is 500 feet long, with the casino long gone. The ballroom, where between the world wars the likes of Guy Lombardo, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra performed, is gone, too.

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Visiting Old Orchard Beach pier

The pier today consists of carnival-style food options and souvenir shops. A bar and nightclub house the far end.

An amusement park with a vintage roller coaster and most of the traditional carnival rides sits hard by the entrance to the pier. During summer weekdays, the amusement park opens at 4 p.m. It makes business sense in these days of limited workers; vacationers can play in the sand and water during the day, then hit the amusement park in the evening.

And thousands of people were in Old Orchard Beach. The lure of sand, surf and 1960s attractions still has a hold.

Down the coast in York is a mini-Old Orchard Beach, only less kitschy. York has two stretches of sandy beaches – Long Sands is one mile, Short Sands is maybe 300 yards long.

York is cool because its Shore Road hugs the beach, so cars roll slowly along, with commerce on one side and the sand on the other.

York is more updated than Old Orchard Beach, with a more community feel. At the end of Short Sands Beach on Thursday evening, hundreds of people were gathering for a concert, to be delivered from a gazebo. Another time-machine moment.

The Dish strolled the beach taking photos while I sat in the car doing my Sports Animal radio segment. We were parked 10 feet from the sand, facing the water. Best view I’ve ever had doing radio, and I’ve done radio from the Rose Bowl.

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Where did President George H.W. Bush make his summer home?

Just north of York is Ogunquit, which also has a sandy beach. We didn’t make it to the sand, but we drove through town, what seemed to be a block or two from the beach, and from the look and feel, Ogunquit might be the common ground of the resort town/beach town difference. I’ll have to discover that later.

But the bulk of our Thursday was spent in Kennebunkport, the village made famous as the home of the Bush Compound, the summer home for two American presidents, George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush.

You can view the Bush Compound from across a harbor, but we didn’t go searching. The Dish would have liked some photos, but I screwed up the navigation and got too far south of Kennebunkport to warrant turning around.

The presidential presence is felt in some of the Kennebunkport shops, where Bush memorabilia is sold, but otherwise, you don’t see much promotion of the Kennebunkport/Bush relationship.

Kennebunkport is a resort town, with classic old hotels and a yacht club, art galleries and a tennis club. Kennebunkport has as many clothing stores as T-shirt shops. More telltale sign of an upscale town.

Kennebunkport has all kinds of harbors; we found three, just by walking. Harbors make for a beautiful setting.

The day was gorgeous – low 70s, cloudy – and while I sat on an outside bench as the Dish was in a store trying on a dress, I read an email from a reader, Bryan Reusser, who lives half the year in Tulsa and half the year in Kennebunkport. He had been reading the Maine travelblogs and recommended a stop in Kennebunkport.

I wrote back to tell him I was sitting in Kennebunkport at that very moment.

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Lunch at The Clam Shack in Kennebunkport

About 30 minutes later, he responded by recommending lunch at The Clam Shack, next to the bridge on Kennebunkport’s main drag. When I read that email, we were sitting at the Clam Shack, waiting for our food. The world can be a weird place.

The Dish and I split a haddock sandwich and a cup of clam chowder. The sandwich wasn’t nearly as good as what we had at the Harraseeket Lunch and Lobster Company in South Freeport the other day; this haddock was four chunks of fish. Very good, but it’s hard to eat a sandwich when it’s comprised of separate chunks of meat. However, the chowder was outstanding.

Bryan’s final recommendation was for a shopping stop at Dannah, about a mile down Ocean Avenue off the strip. Sure enough, the Dish found a prize and made a purchase. And as a bonus, we spied a bald eagle. Kennebunkport wharf sits right behind Dannah, and from the water’s edge, we saw the magnificent bird perched in a dead tree across the harbor. I can see why we made it our national emblem.

For dinner, we drove back to Portland and dined at Gilbert’s Chowder House, on the waterfront and a short walk from our hotel.

The uncle of Ashley Keeling, our man Jacob Unruh’s wife, had recommended the lobster stew at Gilbert’s, so I was all in.

Gilbert’s was a grand place. Small, shotgun building, with outdoor seating in the back. Right on the pier. We sat inside, next to a window looking out on Commercial Street.

I got a cup of lobster stew with a lobster grilled cheese. The Dish went with a lobster BLT (hold the LT) and clam chowder. My stew was good – big chunks of lobster in a soup, who wouldn’t like that? -- but I was jealous. My stew was thin. I love thick soup, and the clam chowder was the best on the trip. Thick and creamy. I dreamed of all that lobster in a chowder that thick.

My lobster grilled cheese was good. I’m having lobster about every which way you can. But not in Old Orchard Beach. Lobster isn’t prevalent in the time machine, where pizza and hot dogs rule the day.

Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at 405-760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. Support his work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Maine travel guide: Old Orchard Beach is not Kennebunkport