The vacation - introduction

Well, I am back and still alive ;-)

I have decided to divide the vacation in different posts so you can get a good idea of what I did and where I went.

The itinerary started with short trips to Concord and Lexington, MA. Then we left the next day for the "real" trip. First stop was Portsmouth, NH, shortly followed by Kittery, Maine (or ME for short) and Cape Neddick, ME. We stayed in a hotel in Ogunquit and the next morning continued up the coast to Kennebunkport and Portland. The weather was quite frankly shite so we skipped Portland and drove up to Brunswick, where we stayed at the Econolodge there and did a little drive around to see if there was anything interesting there (not so much).
The next morning we started up Route 1 along the coast, saw some beautiful scenery, stopped at Pemaquid Point Lighthouse (gorgeous!), continued up route 1 through Rockland where we saw Owl's Head lighthouse, then had delicious Thai food in Camden, ME at a new restaurant called the Thai Kitchen. Camden was quite a cute little town so we walked around there a bit and then set off towards Belfast and The Cherished Home. This, I have to explain a little.
Being a huge fan of North and South, I happened to come across some clips of Genie Francis (who played Brett Main in the series) on some soap show, telling about this house she bought in Belfast, Maine and how she converted it into this little shop. For those interested, here's the link - The Cherished Home. So since we were driving up there anyway, I decided we should stop over and have a look around, which we did.
After that, we took off again, this time heading for our final step of that day's journey - Acadia National Park. We checked into our hotel in the evening and took a little look around Bar Harbor, which is such a charming little town! I loved it there! The next morning we set out to see the park in ridiculously pissy and foggy weather. Driving up on Cadillac Mountain, all we could see left and right of us was nothing but fog. We did believe that the sights would otherwise have been spectacular but they weren't meant for us to see. So we did the Park Loop Road, stopped every few minutes on the side of the road to take pictures and film and then decided to go and take another look at Bar Harbor. We found this awesome breakfast place called "Jeannie's Breakfast and Chowder House" and loved it so much that we went there the second morning for breakfast too. Their oatmeal bread was to die for and their omelette too and their pancakes also! Just overall probably the best breakfast I've ever had. And the waitresses were awesome too, lots of fun and just a great place to hang out in the morning.
The second morning we went down to see the Bass Harbor Lighthouse which is west of Acadia and after breakfast at Jeannie's we took off for the longest driving trip yet. North Conway, New Hampshire - the White Mountains.
The weather was ok whilst driving the 5 hours and of all the hotels, the one in North Conway was probably the worst one. Though still good and fairly clean.
The next morning we woke up to pouring rain, not being able to see the mountains that we'd seen from our room the evening before, so we decided to do some shopping (conveniently, there was an outlet mall within two minutes walking distance from out hotel). One of my next posts will be about the damage done to my credit card there and throughout the trip - you should look forward to that, it ain't pretty! ;-)
We did go towards Jackson later in the day and had a look at the most awesome waterfall, Glen Ellis Falls - it was unbelievable.
The next day we were off to see the White Mountains and the weather got gradually better throughout the day. We took the Cog Railway all the way to the top of Mt. Washington (it cost a friggin ridiculous $59 EACH but turned out to be well worth it) and then continued down Rt 302 and then the Kancamagus Highway through the mountains. By then the weather had cleared and the sights were pretty much breathtaking. And I only live about two, three hours away from that!!!! If I stick around in this country, I'll definitely be back soon!
The next day we took a trip to Lost River Gorge which was supposed to be caves that you could go through but out of something like 11 of them, only 3 or 4 were actually accessible which sucked. We paid $11 to just walk up and down some, granted beautiful, stairs and walks and I felt seriously cheated.
Our last leg of the trip was to be Vermont, and we left around noon to get to Burlington, VT. Once there we checked into our hotel again and spent a nice half day at Lake Champlain, playing with something similar to a frisbee but much more fun due to its unpredictability when thrown.
And then it was already time to go home, but not without a one hour stopover to the Ben & Jerry factory where we did the little tour, tasted one of the new flavors for 2007 Cinnamon something or other, and generally had a good time looking through the flavor graveyard! LOL

So, this was the fairly short summary - more posts will follow with more detail and pictures, I promise! :-)