A Portland Winter's Welcome

This is our apartment building, 15 Clifford Street, on the September 2014 day we contracted to buy our new home.

And this is what we came home to. When ya move to Portland, Maine on February 3, it's really cold and beautiful. Some days temps didn't get out of single digits, and 70+" of snow was a quantity for the record books. We live on the second floor, the apartment with the blinds closed, an effort to keep out the cold (we later learned some of our radiators had either been turned off or were missing a control valve entirely).

The wonder of living in a condo is that someone else does the plowing and shoveling. Here's Allen admiring plowman Eric's work in the parking lot at the back of our building. At some point, determined perhaps by the same force of nature that has flocks of birds turning in unison, we all rush out to move our cars to the other side of the lot so Eric can come through and clear the remainder.

Eric also snowplows the sidewalks. Standing in front our porch looking to the right...

... and straight across the street....

...and in the street...

Here's sort-of the same view from our living room windows. We got several pretty good snowstorms right away, nothing like Boston, two hours to the south, but impressive nonetheless.

Getting our Portland is really easy, though. Roads are cleared quickly, and well-practiced drivers just get out in the snow and go. I recall hearing about a few school closures in the northern part of Maine when daily high temps were in the 10-below range, but none due to snow alone except for one day during one blizzard. When I took this video, I was inside the Portland Museum of Art when it was snowing heavily but folks were just going along anyway.

As testament to the winter's extreme cold, Portland's harbor froze up for the first time in 10 or 30 years (depending on who was telling the story). It was beautiful.

Looking across the Bay of Maine to South Portland:

Some ships were used as icebreakers. The regular ferry schedule to Casco Bay islands was not affected at all, thanks to these. Portland is a real working port, one of the reasons we wanted to move here.

We took the ferry to Peake's Island and back just to experience what it felt like to go through the ice. You could tell the ferry's engine was straining a bit, but there was no slowdown in schedule.

For several days local news featured incidences of icicles falling onto and destroying people's cars in downtown Portland. Walking around, we saw how that was possible. The big question...to gutter or not to gutter?