When I add a travel entry to Ye Olde Blogge, I usually do so every night for international trips and every other night for domestic trips. This last week, we had a great time vacationing and visiting family in Maine, but a combination of my being tired from long touring days combined with Mer’s need to use the laptop to do school prep work meant I only now am getting around to jotting down what we did, in one contains-everything entry.
We had the good fortune to travel to Maine with our friend Brianna, who went with us on our last trip two years ago. She’s a fun and enthusiastic traveler, so we were very pleased she could join us. Plus, on our last trip, several things we showed her were marred by weather (fog) or circumstances (local flooding of water features). As such, we had a chance to show her some of those sights again under normal circumstances.
We take two days to go from Ohio to Maine, and so Saturday we got as far as New Hampshire. It was a long day, but set us up nicely to do some Maine touring and still get home to Livermore Falls in time for supper on Sunday. And so, here’s a summary of our days in Maine:
Sunday – We decided to explore Kennebunkport, which is a cute coastal town where the Bush family (of president fame) has a vacation home. It turns out Kennebunkport is a bit more sprawling than we had imagined, so after an hour of wandering the main street area, we took an hour-long trolley tour of the highlights of the area. It took us out to the ocean and to an old and elegant hotel where we stopped for a photo opportunity off their large patio overlooking the ocean. We drove along the scenic road that overlooks the Bush vacation home (and other beautiful homes, of course). We saw and heard about the large home successful sea captains built, and finished the tour going out along the large public beaches (and seeing more oceanfront homes). It was a good way to see the town.
We did get home to Livermore Falls in time for supper, for which my stepmom had made homemade lasagna and whoopie pies. After eating too much, I suggested we take a walk on the trail to the top of nearby Mt. Pisgah, and so the four of us did that. It was a bit of a race against sunset, and the woods got dim enough that we walked back down a fire-access road instead of down the trail. The views from the top were still very fine.
Monday – Mer took charge of the day and took us to Fort Williams Park in Cape Elizabeth near Portland. The park is home to Portland Head lighthouse, which none of us had ever seen in person (there are tons of photos on postcards in Maine). The park is home to an old fort that was in use until World War II, as well as park lands, two small museums (on the fort and on the lighthouse), the shell of an old mansion, and the lighthouse itself. We joined a free forty-five-minute guided tour that walked us around much of the park, and then we explored the park on our own, including wading in the fairly cold Atlantic Ocean.
Tuesday – Kellee joined the three of us as we explored the Maine Botanical Gardens. It was a very hot day, so we took it easy, but the gardens offered lots of shade. Mer and Brianna joined a tour of the gardens, but it was large enough that Kellee and I dropped out after we discovered we couldn’t hear the guide. We sat in the shade in various pleasant places as we kept in the vicinity of the tour so as to not lose Mer and Brianna.
The garden has five large wooden troll sculptures around the grounds, and we managed to find four of them. We missed one, and by the time we discovered we had missed it, we were sufficiently far away from it as to decide not to go back for it. Many of the garden trails are in the woods and along the Back River, so that was a beautiful and pleasant way to manage the heat. We were all rather taken with the “fairy garden” where people could build little fairy homes out of sticks and rocks and moss. Many were very creative, and the garden had installed some stone structures around with Celtic-style carvings and a small Stonehenge-type circle to add some magical feel to the area. It was well done.
Wednesday – We headed to the coast to the Rockland area. Mer still has some family in that area, and we had arranged to meet Mer’s cousin and her family at the Samoset Resort for lunch. The Samoset is one of my favorite places to eat because the deck looks out over the golf course and ocean. It’s a lovely spot.
But we got to Rockland early enough that we drove out to Owls Head, which is home to a lighthouse on the far side of the harbor from the Rockland Breakwater light. The Owls Head light is in a park on the ocean, and you can climb right up to the lighthouse. The views were very pretty, and we even had the lighthouse to ourselves for several minutes.
Lunch was excellent and it was good to catch up with Mer’s cousin and family. They are lively people, and we chatted for about an hour and a half.
After lunch, we hiked the Rockland Breakwater, which is seven eighths of a mile long. The day was brilliantly sunny, and so we got to show Brianna a fog-free breakwater walk (although the last foggy visit had its own beauty).
We then drove up to Mount Battie in Camden, which two years ago was so fog-bound we didn’t even bother to drive up. We got to the top and were surprised to see some very cool but odd fog. The day had been hot and humid, and so now in the late afternoon the warm air over the ocean was condensing to low-lying fog. It was sunny over land, but the ocean had fog over it, and only to a very low height. It was quite lovely, and I had never seen anything like that.
We finished Wednesday by briefly going to Rockport Harbor, which was foggy. It’s still a pretty place, even in the fog.
Thursday – On Thursday, I was planning things, so I took us back to the coast, to the Brunswick area. Brianna’s Instagram algorithm alerted her that there’s a Hobbit-themed cafe in Brunswick, so we stopped there first for second breakfast. I’m a bit fussy with food, so while I loved the decor of the cafe, I popped over two doors down to get some food from Frosty’s Donuts. After some time, Mer and Brianna joined me, and I encouraged them to get third breakfast – the donuts at Frosty’s are in the argument for best donuts anywhere. So good.
From Brunswick, we drove south to Orr’s Island and then on to Bailey Island (they both have bridge access). We stopped at Land’s End gift shop to sit on the rocks and look at the ocean, as well as to take a quick look around the store. From there we went over to the amazing Giant’s Steps public park, which is a half-mile path along some of the best of Maine’s rocky coast. We sat in various spots for a long time.
We drove back off the islands to Harpswell to do a hike called the Cliff Walk. It’s a bit of a seductive pull-you-in trail. It starts out as a wide crushed-gravel trail for four tenths of a mile, but then becomes a more traditional root-intensive path through the woods. It then adds in two or three very good elevation gains, and we added in two long peals of thunder for bonus material. But the woods were pretty (and not too buggy), and the path ran along an inlet called Long Reach for a long ways. The literal and figurative high point is a 150-foot cliff overlooking Long Reach and a small island. It was a tough hike, but we were pleased with the payoff.
Friday – I was tired on Friday and so tried to arrange a boat tour on Sebago Lake, but the lake had two- to three-foot waves on it, so the boat couldn’t go out. So I punted back to the original more-active plan of going to Coos Canyon and Step Falls, which are in western Maine. The day was finally much cooler, and so was a good day to go inland.
We had visited both of these places two years ago with Brianna, but Maine had just had an unusually rainy season, and both places were a torrent of rushing water that effectively covered the canyon and step features. This time, Coos was its usual tame self, and we could get down on the rocks next to the stream.
Step Falls was much the same way – last time the best we could do was sit on rocks on the high areas and marvel at the rushing water. This time Step Falls was back to being a moderate flow, and this allowed us to climb around on multiple levels of the falls and wade in the pools at a couple of different levels. We sat on the edge of a pool with our legs in the water and relaxed. Step Falls is back in the woods a bit, and the hike in and out was pretty as well.
Saturday – We left on Saturday, but we wanted to do some light touring on the way to Syracuse, New York, where we would be spending the night. I took us thought New Hampshire and Vermont, which are pretty places to drive, and we visited Middlebury College’s mountain campus, Bread Loaf, which we hadn’t taken Brianna to two years ago when we drove through Vermont. We also walked the Robert Frost Trail, a short hike with Frost poems posted along the side of the trail.
And so today we head home to Ohio. It was great to see Kellee and Jeremy and Mer’s cousin Tracy and her family. It will be good to get home, but we had a fun time in the Northeast.