Portland

Places You Should Definitely Visit in Portland

1. Hadlock Field – home of the Red Sox AA minor league fanchise, the Seadogs. Highlights of a Seadogs game include silly games and promotions between every inning, the Portland Room (Local beers! On Tap! Lots of the!) and of course the chance to see potential future major leaguers at a very reasonable price.

2. Shipyard Brewery – Did I tell you I plan to visit every microbrewery or brewpub in New England? Well I do. I think this one makes six or seven out of the fifty odd places on the list in the book visited to date.

3. The John Ford Monument

4. Brian Boru – How an Irish joint should be – welcoming and unpretentious, not tarted up with plastic Paddy nonsense for the tourists. $2.0 pints of Guiness? Yes please.

Places You Should Definitely Avoid in Portland

1. Bull Feeney’s – A visit here was like being in that scene in the movie, where the building is burning or the ship is sinking, and everyone’s running about aimlessly, and no one’s in charge though maybe someone’s pretending to be in charge and you know that what needs to happen simply won’t.

My beer did come in a purty glass though.

2. Gritty McDuff’s – quite literally the worst service I’ve ever had – or not had, to be more accurate. It’s a hard to place an order when all of a sudden you’re the invisible man. I wish them nothing but ill.

Fortunately, after the disaster that was trying to get food in Portland, The Girl and I were able to retreat to Molly Malone’s in Portsmouth for an excellent meal (Yummy cut o’ meat and apparently the veggie potato skins are to die for) and fantastic service (our waitress, Mary, went above and beyond to feed us Sunday evening. Yay Mary!).