maine.

a non-exhaustive list of my favorite summertime haunts.

It’s hardly original to have an enduring love affair with Maine in the summertime, but here I am. Mine was a sudden kind of falling in love when, as a freshly minted eight-year-old, my family camped in Acadia National Park for two weeks straight. Somehow we all survived my dad’s strict dishwashing regimen and the VW-bug-sized racoons and lived to tell the tale. I spent one half of the trip vividly imagining an alternate balsam-scented life on Cranberry Island and the other half worrying about whether I would have to wake up in the middle of the night to pee. Thirty-five years later I’m glad to report that my regular imaginings of alternate lives has continued but that my anxiety about nighttime camp pees has mostly waned.

This week, our family is back from what’s become an annual trip. While I’m still in the throes of the accompanying annual reckoning with the fact that I can’t live two lives at once, I thought it might be helpful (or else cathartic) to share a guide with some of my very favorite places to enjoy in Maine.

As any travel guide is apt to be, mine is personal and quirky and probably missing lots of things that locals would call essential or hallowed or loved. I’ve kept my guide limited to places I’ve visited myself—most of which are on the route from midcoast Maine up to Acadia and Mount Desert Island—so it might be absent of a number of gems that I know are beloved by others.

I’ll update the guide as I think of more favorites or, with hope, experience more of them for myself. For now, you can find it on Rec League, where it’s accessible with a code to all paid subscribers, and for a small fee to anyone else. (Paid subscribers will find the Rec League code below the jump.)