A trip to Maine

Growing up I spent a week on Mt Desert Island in Maine almost every Summer. My grandparents owned a cottage on the island, so it was a family getaway. I loved it! Quality time with my grandparents, and family. Along with exploring all the nature, I could around the island. Now as an adult with my daughter, I love getting back to the island every few years to share and explore it with her, and my husband.

I’m located in Virginia and Mt Desert Island is about a 13-hour drive from home. We break our drive into 2 days, so we can stop somewhere new to explore on our way up. We try to get 8-9 hours of driving on the first day, so our second day of driving isn’t quite as long in the car. Keeping an active child entertained in the car is no easy feat. I always come prepared with a tablet for playing, but I don’t want her plugged in the whole car ride so I bring special car activities every trip. These activities are almost always something that we can do together, like  MadLibs and Road Trip Bingo. Before our drive to Maine, I found Would You Rather - Disney Edition cards on Pinterest (Click Here for a Link to it on Or So She Says blog!). 

This most recent trip to Maine we decided to stay in Boston overnight on the drive up. The afternoon we arrived there we spent a couple of hours exploring the Franklin Park Zoo. It was a really cute zoo, with some animals we don’t have at the DC Zoo. My daughter enjoyed playing in the playground that resembles a birds nest.

Acadia National Park takes up a vast majority of Mt Desert Island. You can honestly do almost any outdoor activity your heart desires. We decided to ease into our adventuring and took it easy the first day. The first thing we did was drive up to the top of Cadillac Mountain and walked around taking in views of the island. Then we walked along the Ocean Path and checked out some of the short offshoots to the island’s edge. Worth it for some amazing panoramic ocean views. Then we walked back to Sand Beach and relaxed while our daughter played in the sand.

Another day we went for a bike ride around (some of) Eagle Lake, and honestly, it was amazing. The views while riding were beautiful, and the gravel path was smooth enough that our bikes had no issues on it. Afterward, we went to lunch in Bar Harbor. Bar Harbor is a great place to easily find something delicious to eat, and to buy souvenirs. Our favorite shops on the main drag are Cool As A Moose, which has tons of fun clothing and other souvenirs, and Stone Soup, which is a great little shop full of cool toys, and games, for kids. We decided to do some window shopping after lunch while we waited for low tide. During low tide, you can access Bar Island via the sand bar which is covered by water throughout the rest of the day. The cool thing about this was the number of shells, snails, and other sea life we were able to see. Sand Bar was wider than I expected it to be but not as busy as I was anticipating either.

For my family, no trip to Mt Desert Island would be complete without hiking to the top of at least one mountain. This year we hiked one of the easier paths which lead us to the top of South Bubble Mountain so we could see Bubble Rock up close! Bubble Rock is a glacial erratic, which means it’s a huge boulder that was moved by ancient glaciers to its current location. We had planned to hike some more adventurous mountains as well, but a few rainy days didn’t let that happen. We will conquer those mountains on our next trip!
~Margaret Moreau