In honor of the (hopefully) last toll bill I received in the mail this month, I felt it was finally time to write about our fall break trip from last year. We took a road trip in October, made a quick stop at Niagara Falls for the evening, visited Boston on the way to Bar Harbor, Maine, hiked and explored Acadia National Park and surrounding areas, then stopped in Boston on the return trip.
It was a lot of driving, a lot of beautiful scenery, and a lot of fun. Here’s where we went and what we did.
How many vacation pictures is too many vacation pictures? Asking for a friend who wants you to come over and watch her 45-minute slideshow with accompanying puppet narration.
We were gone a total of 8 days last fall to check off more states on our quest to visit all 50 before our girls graduate high school. Our first stop on this adventure was Niagara Falls, New York. We drove all day and made it just in time to see the sun setting over the falls. We spent the night nearby, then hit the road early the next morning for our next destination: Boston.
We spent a day and night in Boston, eating delicious food, exploring the New England Aquarium, and resting up before we pushed through to Maine.
(We’ve been to both Niagara Falls and Boston before, so we didn’t get to check any states off the list with those stops, unfortunately.)
We rolled into the Sunrise Cottage on Beech Hill Pond in Otis, Maine, on Monday evening. This was home base for the rest of the week. We loved this cabin and wish we had been able to spend more time there relaxing on the porches and using the amenities, but we were mostly just there in the evenings after hiking or exploring all day. The house was about 40 minutes outside of Acadia National Park, but it was close to a little town with shopping and restaurants, plus you drive through a slightly larger town on the way to the park with even better shopping and restaurants. It would seem you’re not close to the park or Bar Harbor, but we felt this was an okay distance to travel each day. If you have little kids and want to get to the park or Bar Harbor quicker, I’d definitely pick someplace else though.
The next four days were hiking and shopping and trying new restaurants and eating lots of ice cream. Fall in Maine is busy—rightfully so—so when we got into the park each day, Chris Graham went out of his way to take us to less busy hikes and lookouts. You know, the ones the tour buses and older people can’t get to. *awkward smile* That plan led to some pretty intense accidental hikes, but we all survived. Except we almost lost two people on the Precipice Hike, in all seriousness, and we should not have jumped on that trail without reading some signs, like the one that said people have died on this trail and please don’t do it when it’s wet or if you’re not a skilled hiker. Which was super cool since it was most certainly wet and we had some people in our group who were not skilled hikers.
It made for some good stories though, and Chris Graham got a cool t-shirt to commemorate the experience, but we all voted to never do that one again.
This was a good trip because the area has a good mix of shopping and delicious food, with a very large side helping of pretty landscapes and mountains. As our daughters get older, they are less enthused to spend a week hiking in a national park, so we have to temper that with bribery purchases at local bookstores, ice cream parlors, and gift shops. But those bribes were worth every penny, because Acadia National Park is stunning, and it felt ridiculously lucky to be able to see it in all its splendor in the fall.
After the week in Maine, we packed up and headed back to Boston. It’s about a four-hour drive, which is a good stopping point for gas and stretches. We got back into town just in time to tour Fenway Park and do a little baseball shopping, then we ate dinner near the ballpark and hit the road heading east for home.
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