Trip to Maine (Vacation Recap Part 1)

After a late spring early summer with weekends that were so jam packed with bridal showers, bachelorette parties, weddings, baby showers and other scheduled activities my fiancé (herein referred to as AG) and I booked a vacation!  We hadn't taken more than a long weekend since our cruise last October so a 5-day trip was much needed.  With the weather in NY being unbearably hot this summer I needed something cooler, something to the north.  AG and I always talk about trips to Maine we had taken with our families when we were younger, but never made the trip up together.   I looked up a bunch of hotels in southern Maine and quickly realized that Maine in August is a hot destination and lacking any good hotel deals.  I'd long been wanting to try Homeaway and this was the perfect opportunity.  A quick Homeaway search turned up a bunch of places to stay at the same price or less than staying at a hotel.  After saving some "favorites," we reviewed and settled on a 1-bedroom apartment near Lake Sebago.

We headed up on a Friday night with reservations outside of Boston - we left late enough and avoided the masses of other folks leaving for the weekend and didn't hit much traffic, and did make one stop at Friendly's for the bathroom and a sundae.  We got a late start on Saturday morning; hey it was vacation, so we wanted to sleep in a little. We didn't drive far before realizing that everyone on the eastern seaboard also thought Maine would be a great August vacation.  Traffic was slow moving on I-95 so we figured we'd take a scenic detour and spend the time seeing something other than the back of the same car for 100 miles.

We ended up on US-1 driving right along the east coast of Mass and NH.  We discovered the odd town of Hampton, NH which I'd never heard of and had a mixture of Jersey Shore and a North Carolina feel - not at all what I would have expected.

View from car of Hampton, NH

After the detour, we were back on I-95 and still slowly making our way into Maine and getting hungry (it had been a few hours since our breakfast stop at IHOP). Our first Maine stop - Ogunquit, a quintessential Maine town.  There's lobster on the water, sailboats in harbor and plenty of souvenir, candy and antique shops to satisfy the typical tourist.  We walked around, had dinner at the well-known Barnacle Billy's for our first lobster of the trip.

First lobster of the vacation

View of Ogunquit harbor

After some time in Ogunquit, we headed to find our home for the next few days in Naples, ME. Stay tuned for Vacation Recap Part 2 and 3 to hear about our lake adventures and Maine attractions.