birthday celebration

I celebrated my birthday this year by spending the entire day in some of Maine’s most beautiful places.

5:15am: I hit the road in my 4Runner, headed north to the Schoodic Peninsula, the much-less-visited but just-as-beautiful part of Acadia National Park. I crossed the Penobscot Narrows just as the sun crested the spires of the bridge, and made it by 7am, arriving to an absolutely empty parking lot.

I biked the two-hour loop around Schoodic Point, through Winter Harbor, and back to the campground. A stunningly beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, a little bit of a breeze blowing, and cool enough to make exercising enjoyable.

Next, I drove through Blue Hill to Brooksville, for a stop at Tinder Hearth - on Saturday mornings, they serve pastries and coffee out of their barn, and you can grab a picnic table in the garden and enjoy a delicious croissant like this strawberry rhubarb creation.

I put my kayak in the water at the end of Wharf Road in South Blue Hill - not my favorite launch site, it was a concrete parking lot full of boat trailers with a long cement ramp into the water. But it got the job done, and I kayaked between the peninsula and Jed’s Island all the way to Blue Hill Falls and back. The water was a little choppy, since the wind was up, but not too bad, and there wasn’t another boat in sight.

The final stop on Blue Hill Peninsula was at Bagaduce Lunch, for a celebratory softserve swirl cone overlooking the water. Then it was back to Rockport, for a birthday dinner at my favorite hometown restaurant Nina June.