The Vacation Chronicles

I don’t feel exuberant and wistful looking back on our vacation this time. We had a good time, really we did, but I don’t know, it wasn’t one of those vacations you look back on and wish you were still there. As I said before, traveling this year was a whole lot different than last year, and entertaining Eddie and Caitlyn proved to be troublesome. When we were out and doing things, it was great, but being in the car, or in the hotel, or even in a restaurant pretty much sucked. The kids were bored, we were frazzled, and everyone was exhausted.

We were on the road by 4:45 AM on Wednesday and we were both surprised at how easy and uneventful the drive actually was. We made it in to New Hampshire before 5:00 PM and we had stopped several times during the drive. We headed straight to dinner, swam in the hotel pool and were in bed fairly early.

I think we were all surprised to have slept in until almost 9:00 AM on Thursday. [ The hotel, by the way, was not nearly as fancy as their website made it seem. (This is where we stayed The marble finishing in the bathroom was silly; the extravagant bath products were the same that I actually own from Bath and Body Works, and the whole place smelled like bleach. (On our last night there the showerhead actually fell off while Ed was in the tub) It was a decent hotel, juts not what it was made out to be.] But anyway, we had breakfast at the buffet in the hotel and decided to drive up Mount Washington.

In the brochures, The Mount Washington Auto Road appears to be paved and safe, but in actuality, it’s a freaking death trap. The signs say it is wide enough for 2 cars to pass in opposite directions at any given time, but these must be compact Italian cars or something. There is no way that two SUV’s or minivans could have passed through at the same time. There are no guardrails; there is nothing other than your own seatbelt to keep you safe during your drive. So as extremely responsible parents, we drove right on up. The scenery, while beautiful, did not make up for how nervous I was the entire way up there. Caitlyn screamed until we were physically inside a cloud because it was so sunny out. And oh yeah, it was 32 degrees at the top of the mountain.










After driving down and grabbing a snack, we headed over to The Lost River Gorge and Boulder Caves, which is gorgeous and breathtaking…..and has about four million stairs. Ed had to carry Caitlyn through because she would have seriously held us up. Seriously. Eddie took a few photos while we were there:




And of course we captured some of the scenery and the kids.





We ate at The Muddy Moose that evening which is so incredibly cute, but unfortunately my scrod tasted like garbage. Or like garbage smells I guess. Then again, that’s probably what I get for eating something called “scrod”

We slept in again on Friday, and checked out of the hotel before we went on The Hobo Railroad. The kids loved the train ride, which came complete with a hobo lunch and bindle souvenir.










Afterwards we went to Clark’s Trading Post, which I just love, and shopped for a bit. We also bought fudge….Oreo fudge to be exact which we haven’t seen anywhere in years. We ate so much of it that it actually makes me nauseous to think about it now.

We headed in to Maine that evening and arrived around 6:00 or so. Maine for me was not anything spectacular, but maybe we just weren’t in the right area. We decided to keep the kids up late that night and grabbed a late dinner with Melissa and caught up for a while since we hadn’t seen her since I was 9 months pregnant with Cait. We made plans for the following day and called it a night.

After breakfast in the hotel on Saturday, we took a ride to see Lenny, the world largest chocolate moose, and then drove down to the ocean in the rain. We checked out a few shops and then went back to the hotel to get Melissa. It stopped raining, so we went to The Maine Wildlife Park, where I finally saw a live moose. Half joking, I asked Ed to climb the fence and take a picture for me so there wouldn’t be fence in the way, and he did it. The kids really enjoyed it, Eddie especially, but only because he thinks we peed in a garbage can. There was an outhouse in the middle of the park, and the toilet was actually a long metal cylinder with a seat on top of it, hence the garbage can confusion. If you ask Eddie what his favorite part of vacation was, he’ll tell you peeing in the garbage can.










That evening we dined at DiMillio’s Floating Restaurant, which was really good. It’s a huge old boat on the Portland waterfront and we ate while watching the sunset over the water. We drove around downtown a bit that evening as well. It was really nice to see a place with a developed waterfront that was booming.

Sunday, our last day there, we took a ride on The Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad, which was horrendously lame. We did get a few good shots of the ocean while we were there though, and cute photos of the kids as well. Afterward, we went to The Desert of Maine and then had lunch in Freeport. After a stop at Ben and Jerry’s and a great little store called Cool as a Moose, we were ready to head back.












We packed up that evening, and left for home at 4:00 AM on Monday, and actually made it home at about 2:30 in the afternoon.

It was a good vacation which left our bank account very much depleted, but in the end, we scored some pretty sweet shot glasses, took some great photos, and don’t forget, Eddie peed in a garbage can.