My mother and I took a quick trip over President’s Day to Maine, one of my favorite places in the world. I have visited Acadia National Park every year of my life, visiting even before my first birthday, and it is like a second home. One of the things that excited me most about living in Boston was how close I would be. So for my first long weekend, it seemed like a logical trip to make. My mother flew into Boston from Philadelphia, and we rented a car and drove from here. We stayed with friends of ours who are lucky enough to live there.
When we made the plans, I assumed we would have snow and do winter things like snowshoe and cross-country ski. Though it was still pretty cold, there was zero snow, thanks to our very mild winter. At first I found this very disappointing, but after we stopped at L.L.Bean in Freeport and bought the poor man’s version of crampons, I realized we were actually lucky. We were able to do almost all the hiking we do in the summer. The only obstacle was that most of the park roads are closed.
We arrived late Friday night and were up early Saturday to hit the mountains in the short sunlight. We parked on Route 233 by the padlocked gate to the park’s loop road and hiked up the road the base of the Cadillac Mountain North Ridge Trail. The first mile or so of the trail was nearly entirely a sheet of ice, but despite my mother’s fearful protests, we made it safely to a beautiful view.
We made the most of our short three days, driving around the island to our favorite haunts, catching pizza and a movie at my favorite movie theater ever, and a fancier dinner at Red Sky in Southwest Harbor. We did an impressive amount outside, too — a bunch of sightseeing and small hiking after our trek on Cadillac.
I did one other longer hike the morning before we left, summiting Pemetic Mountain. It was a very different feeling than in the summer, even though the trail was very usable. I didn’t meet a single soul along the way and had to park at another padlocked gate and hike in from there. Knowing I was one of very few people to be seeing the views from the top made them even more special. Though it was cold, it was a very clear, blue day, and I could see islands and mountains for miles around.
As we left Mount Desert Island to drive home, we took a detour over to Schoodic Peninsula, the only section of Acadia on the mainland, across Frenchman Bay to the east. The peninsula, which is ringed by a six-mile loop road that makes a great bike ride in the summer and is plowed in the winter, offers sweeping views back toward the bald mountains on Mount Desert. Though we did not stay long, we felt like we had made the most of what the park had to offer in the middle of February.
We turned south, and the sun began to wane as we drove. The orange-pink light looked beautiful across the frozen surface of Lake St. George.
We capped off our trip with a dinner stop in Portland, where I had found us J’s Oyster, a seafood restaurant right on the old wharf. We each enjoyed some local brews before I dove into the seafood bouillabaisse, filled with everything the Maine ocean has to offer, and my mother tucked into something a bit more unusual. Apparently it is agains the law to sell scallops on the half-shell in the state of Maine — they have to be shucked on the boat — but our waitress has the one exception currently granted anywhere in the state. So my mother enjoyed her scallops, which had been baked into puff pastry.
The weekend was incredibly relaxing. For me, Acadia is a place where I can immediately unwind and recharge. It was also the most time I had spent outside in a couple months, and I returned to Boston rejuvenated and ready to go back to work.
