For my 34th birthday, I wanted to go on a trip. Up there with photography, dogs, and eating ethnic food is my other great passion, travel. But where to go? My friend Margaret put me on to FareCompare and they have this awesome feature where you can choose the month and year you’d like to travel, add in where you’re leaving from, and they will calculate the cheapest airfares out of your city for any given month. Other than Charlotte or Raleigh, which was not exactly the “trip” I was thinking, Boston was also close to the top of that list. Then the wheels started turning… Maine is within driving distance of Boston!
I feel like Maine is one of those destinations Charlestonians gravitate to, kind of like Cashiers, NC. And everyone raved about how it is the perfect place to be in August, so off we went.
We spent our first evening walking around Portland and ate here, at the Portland Lobster Co. I don’t even eat lobster, seafood, or much meat for that matter, I just really liked the logo design and they had a cool deck over the water to sit on. They did have some delicious corn on the cob and blueberry beer!
I’d already been spoiled with a birthday cake while at the beach with my family, thanks Audrey! So on the road, this lemon lavender cupcake was my b-day cupcake.
Other than our first night in Freeport, we camped the whole time. The sun rises super early in Maine, 5:30am-ish, but it wasn’t a bad view from the tent at this camp site over a quarry.
This is the Bar Harbor Inn and was along the path on the coast that passes by the gorgeous sprawling coastline “cottages”.
The flora was bucolic, I loved it. It was like Spring up here.
We’d had a weird experience at a lobster pound the night before where they’d actually run out of lobster, of all things. But the next day, we scored big at Thurston’s Lobster Pound. Gorgeous view, loads of food, and a sunset that seemed to go on for hours!
Here’s the spread!
Another big score was the Bar Harbor farmer’s market on a Sunday morning. Fresh blueberries, homemade olive bread, artichoke hummus, homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers… It was one of the best meals of the trip!
We spent two days exploring Acadia National Park making teenage jokes about the “Bubbles”, a set of mountain ranges that look like, well you guessed it! The first day there, we rented bikes and explored the carriage roads that John D. Rockefeller had built through the area.
This part of Maine, around Bar Harbor, pretty much shutters up between the end of October through to April. It’s just too cold and wintry for the tourists to come. Summer is the big business time, when the locals store up their profits for the long winter. We did our best to contribute and visited a bakery one morning on our way up to the top of Cadillac Mountain. Looking at this photo reminds me of the divine breakfast we had atop of Cadillac Mtn. Double cut bacon, homemade cinnamon roll, and homemade bagels with cream cheese.
