Et in Acadia Ego
a long account of a short vacation in Maine
Does anyone actually want to read a travel narrative about my family’s vacation to Acadia National Park in Maine— or is this the equivalent of sharing your vacation photos to an unwilling audience? At least on Substack you can click away if this isn’t your cup of tea, right? You’ve been warned, at least.
This was my first time visiting Maine during lupine season. I felt like I had driven into Miss Rumphius land (If you don’t know Barbara Cooney’s picture book Miss Rumphius, you should go find a copy at your local library (or you can watch a read aloud on You Tube). Even if you don’t have kids.)
As we drove through Maine the highways were lined with lupines:
Pools and puddles and patches of imperial purple lupines.
Sadly, I didn’t get any photos of the lush pools of royal purple lining the roads. In fact this was the only lupine photo I got.
This is the first time we've taken two cars on vacation. It meant I had to drive the whole way. But 19 year old daughter DJed from the backseat while 17 -year old bounced to the beats in the front seat next to me. She started with a mix of familiar tunes I listened to in cars and restaurants, on radios and at parties when I was in high school and college. But there were plenty of new-to-me songs that my daughters have collected in the ways that teens collect music: this song came from Hannah and this was from Lily and this playlist is the one I made to go with a story I was writing about a couple taking their honeymoon in Maine….
We drank coke and lemonade and ate seaweed snacks and told stories and talked about movies and books and music and memories. We all oohed in amazement at the lupines growing along the highway. Lupines and daisies and so many other beautiful wildflowers that I cannot name.
We camp in a private campground outside the national park and on the other side of the island in Southwest Harbor. The campsites are nice and big and ours is surrounded by trees. There's hot running water in the bathrooms and it's just the right speed for our family. When we get to the camp everyone scatters for twenty minutes, swings on the playground, finds the bathrooms, all the brief explorations that you need after a long car ride.
Everyone helped set up camp: the three girls have their own large tent and the two boys are in the big room of the three-room tent. Dom and I each get our little rooms off the side of the boys’ tent. We don't share a sleeping space because he has his own camp cot to sleep on while I have an air mattress. It just worked out that way.
We put up a canopy over the camp kitchen-- which is Dom's domain, not mine, though I help a little with the cooking and we all take turns doing the dishes. And another canopy with mesh sides to keep out bugs over the table for a sitting area.
We have never had this much gear before, but renting a small trailer has given us room to kit ourselves out more luxuriously. We have seven folding chairs and two different folding tables and Dom's Blackstone griddle. This almost feels like glamping.
Once everything was settled at camp, we went to our traditional first night dinner at Beal's Lobster Pier. Huge baskets of fried seafood, sitting at the best table in the house, on a little balcony overlooking the harbor with golden evening light spilling all over everything, turning it all magical.
Ignore the shivering twelve year old who forgot her coat and the miserable dissociating teenager who cannot deal with the noise and the people. Focus on the happy smiles, the plates of golden fried fishes, the french fries, the blueberry soda.
I give away my long sleeve overshirt, which I was so proud to have brought to cover my bare arms and shoulders, to the cold preteen, and then resent her for taking my warmth. And yes I am childish and I complain and needle her about it. I am not the stuff of heroes. Just a middle aged mom, cranky and cold. I had foresight, why didn't you?
No campfire tonight. Everyone is tired and scatters to their sleeping bags. We don't even say our usual compline prayers.
I'm too old to sleep in a tent, I grumble. But we do it for the kids. And because camp sites are cheaper than hotels.
At least there are new bathrooms, clean and bright. It's not until the second day that I start to hate even these bathrooms— because every stall has a air freshener dispenser and my clothes smell of it even while walking on the top of the mountain and it's giving me a headache. Do we really need air freshener when they clean the bathrooms every day? Ugh.
I pause in the field on the way back to my tent after a late night shower and I can see stars upon stars upon stars. It's so beautiful and clear. Glorious.
In the morning we have eggs and bacon and hash browns. Everyone but me eats theirs on English muffin sandwiches. Ben claims the unused grease pot as an extra-large ("industrial-sized") tea mug and is beamingly happy about it.
Our first full day in the park is sunny and bright but not too hot. There's a lovely sea breeze everywhere we go. We drive the park loop road. There are people everywhere and I wish there were fewer of them.
But when we reach Otter Cove, there is no one else there and we have the place to ourselves. I guess most people don't want to stop at a pebble beach at low tide. Of course we seem to have set up the bat signal that this is a place one can stop, because by the time we leave there are eight other cars and many other groups wandering about on the beach. Sophie finds more crabs, Lucy whistles at periwinkles, Anthony finds long flags of seaweed. The boys climb up the rocks next to the bridge, Bella wanders about doing her own thing. Ben gives me a piece of driftwood shaped like a miniature tree.
We drive to the top of Cadillac Mountain-- this time you need a reservation to drive up which is sensible because it's always a crush and there's actually quite a bit of parking, but it's never enough. Timed entry helps to keep the limited parking from overflowing.
We clamber around on the rocks and remember the last time we were here, about seven years ago. The kids are much, much bigger now. They don't fit in the cracks and crevices quite like they used to. We get a yo-yo at the gift shop, in memory of the one we got last time. And a tiny Christmas ornament shaped like a miniature version of the mug we got last time. I've become that mom who collects Christmas ornaments on family vacations.
Sophie picks up trash like a good scout and Ben leaps to grab an older man's cane when it falls-- I'm proud of him in his bright red scout cap, representing helpful boy scouts everywhere.
After a picnic lunch of sandwiches in the car on top of Cadillac Mountain, we go back around the park loop road. Now we stop a little past the ever-crowded Thunder Hole to climb and clamber on the rocks and search tide pools, to watch the waves washing the rocks, to befriend crabs and gulls. Bella makes a gull friend who she calls Barnaby. Sophie befriends crabs, one of whom loses a limb while she's holding him. She calls him Billy.
The kids run and leap over the tumbled boulders while Dom and I walk more gingerly. Leaps I would have made without thinking when I was twenty or thirty started looking a bit risky when I turned forty. So I don't go all the way over to the tide pool where Sophie finds her crab. She brings the crab to me and lets him go in a nearby pool. Everywhere we go Sophie manages to find crabs. And if not crabs, then grasshoppers or praying mantises. She's not afraid of small creatures who are well-endowed with legs. She's not freaked out when a crab pinches her finger with his claw. She doesn't panic and drop him. Instead, she admonishes him to "stop that" and she adjusts her grip to hold his claw shut.
We go back to the campsite and make bratwurst with grilled peppers and onions for dinner (I have mine with some salad and mustard.) Clouds have rolled in and there will be no stars tonight.
We have a campfire but no s'mores. We say our nighttime prayers around the fire and our next door neighbors donate their extra wood. They're packing up and leaving in anticipation of tomorrow's rain. (We forget to put the wood under cover and it gets soaked when the rain starts in the middle of the night.)
Day two is drizzly with a thick Maine fog everywhere we go. It starts raining lightly about 1 in the morning (right after my midnight bathroom run, I thank my guardian angels for holding back the rain until I'm safe and dry in my tent.
We wake up and have breakfast pancakes with bacon and then head out to do the park loop road again, but this time with much less visibility. Still, coastal Maine in the mist is a lovely experience of its own kind.
This time we stop at Thunder Hole-- far fewer people on a damp day. The tide is getting close to high and the waves thunder in the hole in a most satisfying way.
Then we go to Otter Cliffs-- no room to park there yesterday. We can't see much, but we've been here before, so we know what we are missing. We can hear the bell buoy ringing in the fog far below. Bella and I take pictures of lichens in the parking area and talk about photography. We give some advice to an older couple who are exploring the park for the first time.
We have a picnic lunch of sandwiches at Fabbri lookout and then take a brief walk at Jordan Pond before we head into Bar Harbor for an meet-up with my friend Kim who just happens to be at Acadia at the same time and who has been one or two stops ahead of us all morning. We browse in a bookstore while waiting for Kim, who has driven a bit away for lunch and shopping, and I buy a book, American Wildflowers: a Literary Field Guide (and almost buy another collection of Bashō). Bella buys a guide to lichens.
Then we all get ice cream. I get Maine blueberry, of course— though honestly it's not quite as good as Bella's black raspberry). We are having such a good time chatting that Kim and I forget to take a selfie together. She hits it off with the kids as I knew she would because she's a scout mom and knows how to talk to my scout kids. Then she and her husband go off to do some hiking and we return to cook a camp supper of hamburgers and hot dogs with smashed potatoes and more salad for the adults and those children who choose to partake. No campfire because it is too wet.
Poor Ben sleeps in the van because his tent has puddles on the floor. Anthony toughs in out in the tent, but in the morning his pillow and sleeping bag are soaked.
In the morning everything is wet and we decide that since the day is going to be more rain and more fog and because we've already been through the park twice and because the sick kids are feeling more sick and because everything is wet and miserable... we will go home a day early.
But first we have a camp breakfast of eggs and sausages.
Packing up camp takes forever because the sick kids are no help. And two of the non-sick kids are very little help. Instead, Anthony does the lion's share of the work. Somehow in the past year he's gotten much more mature. scouting has done wonders for his ability to pitch in without complaint. We are finally on the road a little after noon. The drive home is quieter. No music, girls more subdued. But we talk a lot, it's great mother-daughter bonding time. And at one point I get a lovely fly on the wall experience listening to them hash out a relationship problem that's been irking them for a while.
We stop for a late afternoon meal at a diner in Maine and count that as both lunch and dinner. By the time we get home it's 8:30, but at least we missed Boston rush hour traffic. (We got a little construction traffic in Maine because in summer in Maine there is always road work.)
On Friday I spread out all the tents and sleeping bags on the lawn to dry in the hot sun. There's a brisk breeze and it doesn't take long for things to dry out. I also do a dozen loads of laundry and unload the trailer and the van. Saturday is spent reading and writing and processing trip photos and catching up on some of the social media I've missed. I have a lovely catch-up conversation with some friends and the kids chill at home instead of going to their scouting event.
Thank you for sharing! We have visited Acadia twice, both as day trips. It does get impressively busy, we also prefer the little side areas where the kids can climb rocks and look in tide pools. We saw lupines the first year we were in Maine, but we haven’t been back in June since. Our last few times we have been there in late summer/fall.
I love reading about other people's travels. It's unlikely I will ever get to Maine, but your photos and words warm my heart.