Vacation Rewind

Why do some vacations seem to go by so fast?  We spent most of our time in Maine with stops in New York (Sleepy Hollow and Saratoga Springs respectively to and fro), Portsmouth NH, Mystic, CT, and Niagara on the Lake, Ontario.  We tried to do a stop in Brimfield MA for their big antique show but the day we were passing through it was raining and I didn't see anything we were passing that said I had to stop.  I'm wondering if that phase of my life is over.  (The Mr skips the length of the living room with glee.)  I did my first kind of non-structured vacation and I confirmed I don't like having a general outline of things to do.  I had like 3 days where we had planned activities but they weren't set in stone because the weather was unpredictable so they had to be interchangeable.

On our way out, we spent a night in Mystic, CT.  It was good to have the whole day to explore when we only got to see it for an hour or so before everything was really open last year.

We are suckers for Maine's craggy coastlines, tall pines and firs and the sound of a loon in the distance.  (The bird, not a figurative lunatic.)  We went to Bangor and Bar Harbor to Acadia National Park for a road trip.  We left at 5am and had a big fog alert that day that never really lifted much but it made for beautiful scenery.

We walked the trail around Jordan Pond that if you take the right fork seems like it's going to be a piece of cake...until you get to the end where you see boulder hopping and a boardwalk as wide as your hips through a bog with no place to jump off when you pass others for a solid mile.

Somehow we did it and what was 3 1/2 miles easily felt like 5 miles.  While I was a hangry wench with no facilities to fill my gullet, I was glad we did it.  We always seem to do something to challenge ourselves on each trip and that was it for this one.  Though we both agreed if we'd started the trail from the left fork and started with that boardwalk and got detoured into a bog, we would've called it a day with 1/2 mile of walking under our belts.

Obviously, we saw our share of lighthouses:

Oh yeah and I fell at the small one on solid granite and it could've been much worse but tell that to my elbow that is going to have a big, gross scar for the rest of my days.  What a time to find out the band-aids in your first aid kit are so effing old the adhesive gave up!

Our house had some issues, most I won't go into but for the love of God, if you're going to rent a house that is 25 feet from another house on both sides then put up blinds.  If people want to be stared at, fine but give them the option for privacy.  Can't count how many times we looked up to see neighbors looking at us.  Thank you Shaw's for having plastic tablecloths we could put up over some of them.

Mornings were beautiful and when I say mornings, I mean the top pic is what it looked like every day at 4:45 am and by 6am, you were blinded it was so bright WITH cloth blinds, so sleeping in never happened.

But we did enjoy s'mores a few times so there's that.

Maine does everything big from their statues to their boots to their whoopie pies.

We ended our trip in Niagara on the Lake, Ontario where we enjoyed poking around the shops and staying locally a few nights.  We had afternoon tea and took a carriage ride which was a lovely way to end it all.

The highlights for us were:

Acadia National Park
Exploring towns as we came across them
Listening to the birds and quiet in the morning
Turning the kids room into our own personal PT room
A day poking around Portland and pampering ourselves at a spa
Walking around Portsmouth, New Hampshire (gorgeous town!)
The hotel and full day spent in Niagara on the Lake

It was a much-needed vacation after a crappy 2018 and of course, we came back to parts of the bathroom that were like "hey, you didn't replace us when you remodeled last year.  We're gonna break now if that's cool" and other irritants so as usual, the mellow doesn't last long but I'll take what I can get.

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