Bradbury Mountain

Way back in the early spring, I made reservations for Acadia National Park.  They allow reservations up to six months in advance, so that's what I did.  We lived in ME when I was but a wee lass (wee-ish), so my parents said we should go in August based on their black fly experiences.  Because of activities we want for the late summer/early fall, we just didn't want to wait that long, so we have reservations for the end of July/beginning of August.  Man, oh man, do we have a long time to kill before our reservations.  We've been killing time since Vermont.  We loved Vermont, so we stayed there something close to two weeks, we stayed almost a week in New Hampshire, and we still have almost two weeks to kill in Maine before our week in Acadia.  Could we have spent more time in the Mid-Atlantic?  Yes, yes we could have.  Would it have killed us to check out Delaware?  I really don't know.  But we should have done it, cuz I'm not hitting it on our way home.  At any rate, I planned out three campgrounds I wanted to hit in our 11 nights.  First on the list?  Bradbury Mountain State Park.  

Bradbury Mountain State Park is only about five minutes outside of Freeport, so we dropped the trailer and made it level, then headed out to see L.L. Bean.  Having been there as a kid, it was built up in memory (I was a SMALL child).  While it's not as large as I remember in any one of their stores, they have a complex of four or five stores.  It was so amazing, we had to visit it twice.  I love L.L. Bean.          

Being that close to Freeport also put us pretty darn close to Brunswick.  This is our old church, St. John the Baptist.  I love this church.  My plan had been to go to Sunday evening mass (changing campgrounds on a Sunday usually means no church for us that day, which is hard for us), but they only have one mass on Sundays, and that's in the morning.  So I contented myself with seeing the outside.  Trust me, the inside is gorgeous, too.                

Right next to the church is the school.  I went there for 5th, 6th, and half of 7th grades.  Pretty much looks the same.  They had a playground that I don't remember, but being in the older grades, we played on the asphalt parking lot behind the school.  Perhaps the playground was always there.  It was neat seeing Brunswick again.  I've not had much chance to ever see a place I used to live, except my adult locations.  We even drove by the old house.              

Bradbury Mountain State Park was nifty to see.  We only stayed two nights, so our exploration of it was limited, but it's a small park, so I feel we saw pretty much everything.  The kids noticed this tree at our campsite.  The acorn is still somewhat attached, which was pretty cool to see.                                      

We took the trail map, and G marked us out a route to hike a couple miles.  I think we did a total of seven trails, but only about two miles.  We started with Summit, which is their steepest trail.  I felt it, too.  I wasn't the only one in our group that was short of breath, though.  Need to get hiking on a regular basis again!  The view from the top, though, was gorgeous.  It was a hot day, so we were a bit tired, but everything else was pretty much downhill for us.                                

Another group of hikers stopped and helped us out with a family photograph.  Bill's not here because he got some work that had to be done.  Only a few hours, but that supplements our savings, so yeah!  We had a great time in Pownal, ME.  Next on the list, Mt. Katahdin.