Roughly every other year, my family takes a vacation to Maine, from Maryland. We load up the beat-up old pop-up tent camper with everything under the sun, pack the car the day before, and then dad gets everyone up at an unholy hour (2am) and we all pile into the car, mom and myself and the younger pup (i.e. lil’ bro) all carrying multiple pillows and blankets and whatever else we may want to help us sleep en route. We check out those Books on CD from the public library, usually about half a dozen of them, to play while driving, so mom or dad puts one of those on, and Younger Pup and myself listen to music with our iPods and headphones while we doze, and by now it’s 2:30 and we’re off!
Dad insists on doing the whole drive in one shot, something like 12 or 13 hours, stopping only for bathroom breaks. Leaving at 2:30am means the roads are nearly deserted and you can cruise at 75 easily so that makes the trip a bit shorter. I always spend most of the trip in a semiconcious daze, listening to my music and/or sleeping, but since most intertates are boring as hell I don’t think I’m missing too much.
Once we’re up there, we set up camp in the same campground we always go to, whose name I forget, but it’s near Bar Harbor. We love it there. Immediately we get fire going using some of the birch logs that they have at the camp store plus bark that my lil bro and i scavenge from the ground… We’ll spend hours hunting for the stuff cuz we love how well it burns. :rolleyes: First-night dinner is always hot dogs cuz everyone is tired and lazy after the drive, then we sit around the campfire and just enjoy that we’re on vacation and have nothing to do, and then we go to bed.
The rest of the week is spent on fun. We go whale watching, usually in small private Zodiac tours (little inflatable open boats with overpowered engines that are fun as hell in their own right). We spend time in Bar harbor, poking around in all the knicknack and curio shops. We climb Cadillac Mountain or whatever the mountain that overlooks the harbor is called; I forget the name. We head down to the beach, except by “beach” I mean “place where the waves crash in against slabs of pink granite and lava rock so massive that neither man nor nature could hope to move them, flinging plumes of spray forty feet into the air with a sound like cannon fire”. We visit old lighthouses. We trek down to Thuder Hole to watch the incoming tide create spectacular sound effects in the natural rock formation there. And we drive down to the docks daily for lobster.
See, my family loves lobster. In Maryland, though, we never eat it, because fresh-off-the-docks Maine lobster is as good as it gets and anything else would be woefully inadequate. So when we go to Maine we indulge - fresh lobster for dinner for six straight days, a whole lobster each every night. We steam them ourselves and eat them with drawn butter and it’s EXCELLENT! And no, we don’t get tired of lobster during those weeks, either. We still have the forks whose tines are bent from the one time we accidentally got hardshelled lobsters and din’t have proper tools to open the bastards; we won’t make that mistake again! Lobster is always served with one side dish - Blueberries. We buy them by the quart, for just a couple bucks a quart, from a variety of houses that just set quarts of the things on tables by the road in their front yards next to a little metal cash box. You pay on the honor system; we always overpay, cuz we’re nice like that. Each family member probably consumes two pints of blueberries a day while we’re up there; no, we don’t get tired of those either. Oh, and we stop by the Pie Lady’s house, this little old grandmotherly type who bakes the most sinfully delicious pies I’ve ever eaten and sells them from her foyer for about 8 bucks each. Blueberry, Apple, Peach-Raspberry, so many choices… Oh, and we also have to get at least one pie from this bakery we found in Bar Harbor that makes Blueberry Pies that literally use over two quarts of blueberries per pie (the pies are roughly 6" to 8" tall before baking). That same place also has a tiny restaurant-cafe thingy where i tried a dish called Fried Cheesecake that was exactly what its name implies. It ws topped with blueberry syrup too. Hae I mentioned I f*****g LOVE blueberries? The rest of our diet consists of breakfast, and restaurant and cafe food, and S’mores made over the nightly campfire - it’s great!
Then on day seven it’s time to bid farewell to Maine and return to real life back home. Everything that happened to get us up here now happens again, only in reverse, and I pass another 12-hour drive while borderline comatose. Its always Sunday when we get back, so the very next day everyhing has to go back to normal; that always sucks. Still, our family trips to Maine are my favorite vacations we’ve ever taken, and we’ve taken quite a few. And I can’t wait til I’m out of college, with a wife and kids of my own, and I can take them up there myself and show them all the things that have left such a big impression on (and such fond memories in) me.
How come there ain’t no MAN-o-gram?
where I’ve never been. The Dopefest was fun, except for a broken ankle (not mine).
We can negotiate a date and time for the exchange at your convenience… I’m pretty free this week, as far as I remember.