PORTLAND — You don’t need a passport to visit the city’s parks, but you might want to get one this summer.

The city is handing out “Passport to Play” booklets, beginning today, to encourage residents to get out and about now that warm weather has returned.

A prize awaits everyone who collects passport rubbings from 10 key parks.

Paid for with tobacco settlement funds funneled through the state’s Healthy Maine Partnerships, the initiative includes the passports, with photos, fun facts and hints on where to find markers in those 10 city parks.

The markers, called passport posts, include raised emblems, which users can take a rubbing of with a pencil or crayon. The passports include blank pages for rubbings from each park to show they’ve been visited.

The program is designed “to get people out and physically active this summer and enjoy some of the city’s parks as part of that,” said Kristen Dow, a community health promotions specialist with Portland’s Health and Human Services Department who is helping run the passport program.

People who fill out the passports completely – including the rubbings – get passes for a free swim at a city pool or a free skate at the Portland Ice Arena. They will also be entered in a drawing for a bike, Dow said, which will be held in October.

Dow said the program is aimed at all ages, from kids to families to senior citizens. Although the markers aren’t a cinch to find, they are in easily accessible open spaces or along trails, she said.

Each marker has a different design. For instance, the one in the woods of Evergreen Cemetery is of a set of binoculars, because the area is popular with bird watchers, Dow said.

The parks include Capisic Pond Park, which has trails and natural areas, and Lincoln Park downtown, which is only about a city block square and mostly open land.

Dow said the city also included some lesser-known parks, like Riverton Trolley Park off Route 302 and Oat Nuts Park, which has a trailhead on Summit Street near the city’s northern border.

Oat Nuts Park was created after a cereal company gave away deeds to 10-foot-by-10-foot plots of land in cereal boxes in the early 1900s. Since most of the owners didn’t pay property taxes on the land, the city reclaimed the plots and eventually pooled them to create a park.

Dow said “Passport to Play” is a relatively inexpensive promotion. City crews placed the markers and it cost about $2,300 to make them and print the 2,500 passport booklets. They are available in the rotunda of City Hall; at the Portland Recreation Department offices in Cummings Community Center on Munjoy Hill; in city libraries; and from park rangers.

Drop boxes for completed passports are at City Hall, the Cummings Center and library branches.

 

Staff Writer Edward D. Murphy can be contacted at 791-6465 or at: emurphy@pressherald.com