Bienvenue!
Each summer, thousands of tourists travel from Quebec to vacation at Old Orchard Beach. For one August weekend, I decided to join them.
By Elizabeth Peavey, Photography by David A. Rodgers
The forecast for the weekend is hot. I mean up-into-the-nineties, we're-having-a-heat-wave, stinking hot. My Yankee constitution is not wired for this kind of swelter. Still, I have but one thought: "Perfect!"That's because come Thursday, I am going to be packing my beach bag and heading for some fun in the sun at one of the most peopled and popular stretches of sand on the Maine coast: Old Orchard Beach. Ordinarily, this might be my idea of a petite slice of purgatory: spend the hottest weekend of the year at the most crowded beach, with its amusement park, fried food, hustlers and hucksters, whining kids, dive bars, sleazy T-shirt shops, tattoo parlors and, to go with it all, lots and lots of uncomely flesh.
