<p>I live about 10 miles north of Portland, and I can’t say too much about how great Portland is. It is a vibrant cultural center that feels much bigger in that respect than it actually is. Think of a mini-Seattle. Portland itself is about 60K people, and there are about 250K in the greater Portland area. I live in a town that still has farms and can be in downtown Portland in 20 minutes, at the airport or bus/train station in 25 minutes. The airport is small enough so that it is easy to zip in and out of.</p>
<p>It has a good professional symphony orchestra and a very lively music scene in many other genres: folk/indie/chamber music you name it. </p>
<p>It has a good art museum and tons of galleries and an art school. There is a First Friday Art Walk every month during which all of the galleries are open in the evening and serve wine and cheese. People roam the streets from gallery to gallery with glasses of wine. 
Lots of fun.</p>
<p>There’s professional repertory theater. There is an extremely active high-quality crafts and artisan community. There is the Maine Organic Farmers Association which holds the annual Common Ground Fair and has members from whom you can buy humanely-raised organic meats, organic wools hand-dyed with natural substances, herbs. vegetables, soaps–you name it. There is indeed a Whole Foods, and there are other organic food stores in the region that were here for decades before WF showed up, just like there are local coffee places that were here before Starbucks arrived. </p>
<p>Portland is a little foodie mecca, as various magazines have recently started to proclaim, with lots of great restaurants. You can buy your milk in bottles from Smiling Hill Farm and your apples from the Sweetsers, who have been living in the same house tending their 60-variety orchard since 1810. You can go down to the working waterfront and buy your seafood from Harbor Fish.</p>
<p>Portland also has minor league baseball and hockey teams, and there’s a new basketball franchise. It has the leading regional hospital–Maine Med–a very good Catholic alternative–Mercy–and two universities, plus other colleges within 30 miles. It’s a port town, so obviously there is ample ocean access. You can also take the ferry out to islands in Casco Bay and go biking or boating. Sebago Lake–one of the largest in the region–and Kezar Lake–the most beautiful, IMHO, are within about an hour’s drive, just to name two. There are plenty of rivers and other lakes for kayaking within an hour’s drive, and lots of really superb pristine hiking and kayaking well within two hours. (It has been proclaimed one of the best places to live by Outside magazine.)</p>
<p>And it is a place with real character. It wasn’t ripped down in the 1960s and replaced with everywheresville office buildings. Although there is a mall in South Portland, in Portland itself there are plenty of local shops. And if you need some arcane piece of camping equipment at 2 am, you can visit the motherlode–LLBean–in Freeport because it’s open 24 hours a day. </p>
<p>Any place with easy access to Portland would be a good idea, IMHO. In South Portland, there’s the Willard Beach area which has charming older houses on city lots near the ocean with a public beach. In Falmouth and Windham there is Highland Lake. Go a bit father west and there are plenty of towns around Sebago. Go west of Bridgeton–very cool little town, but you are getting farther away from Portland in terms of being able to just casually zip in and out–and there is Center Lovell and the other towns on Kezar.</p>
<p>If I were you, I would come up here, stay someplace, and spend some time driving around checking out the possibilities, of which I have only barely scraped the surface.</p>