Experience the best of Bangor

Bangor stands on the Penobscot River in central Maine, and in the nineteenth century it was one of the busiest lumber ports in the world, shipping pine logs cut in the northern woods. Grand Victorian houses along West Broadway, the Thomas Hill Standpipe, a water tower of 1897, and a nine-metre statue of Paul Bunyan, a lumberjack legend the city claims as its own, recall the boom years.

The writer Stephen King lives in Bangor and has set many of his novels in a fictional version of the city called Derry, and his red house with a bat-and-spiderweb fence is a landmark. Mount Hope Cemetery is a Victorian garden cemetery of 1834. Acadia National Park and the coast lie to the south-east, and Baxter State Park and Mount Katahdin rise to the north.

Maine's table runs to lobster rolls, blueberry pie made with wild blueberries, whoopie pies and baked beans. Winters are long and snowy, summers short and bright, and the autumn foliage is brilliant in the hills around the city.