6/29 Day 10: The Maine Adventure Begins!
A few days after the Family Reunion, we began our trip up to Maine. We were so super excited! The only thing we weren’t looking forward to was being in the car for an unknown amount of hours with the little ones. We knew that they would eventually get restless and cranky, it was just about when it would happen and how bad it would be. We brought lots of snacks and car activities to try and make it easier on them and all of us! I had never been to Maine and I’ve always heard it was BEAUTIFUL up there. I had my brand new camera and couldn’t wait to see what Maine was all about! We packed up, packed up the car and the kids and headed for the open road! Thankfully for the first couple of hours the kids rested or slept and so did most of the big kids!
They were stuck to Auntie Sherena like GLUE!!! So cute! 
Our saving grace were the I-pod’s and Portable DVD players. Xander spent most of the drive glued to his Alvin and the Chipmunks movies and Zoey to the I-pod. It took the edge of the crazy-ness level. Then there were the books and crayons and stickers and lots of other super fun things to do when batteries died or interest faded. 
We finally made it to Maine. I was pretty surprised when we had to go through three or four tolls, all of which added up to six dollars!! I couldn’t believe it! Six dollars just to drive up North to Maine! I thought it was a big insane! But, then again, I am from California, we don’t have a bunch of tiny states everywhere. We are one gigantic state, one of which it takes about twenty hours to drive from the northern border to the southern border. I guess I have big state-itis! The drive up to Maine its self was absolutely GORGEOUS! All the green trees and all of the water and cute little houses and all the beautiful wild flowers! It was really amazing. 
We stopped here, one of the infamous stops on the Doane family route, Perry’s Nut House, I think its called. They said its not as good as it use to be, but it was still pretty awesome to stop at a place that I have heard so much about from Lance and their drives up to Maine for Thanksgiving. It kind of filled in a visual puzzle for me. 
We saw lots and lots and lots of water. It was great. My favorite place in the whole world is the Ocean. I can’t get enough of it. Its like a natural high, it makes my heart sign and fills my lungs with an amazing sea salt goodness. The ocean, to me, is wonderful and breath taking and astonishing! I wish we lived closer to it than we do. 
We drove by the Boston Baked Beans factory on our way up!
And ran into a very lovely storm that look as if it could gobble us up at any moment!
I felt like we were in a scene from Storm Chasers for just a second. It was really neat. 
Then there was this bridge. I don’t do bridges very well. This one especially was very intense. It was very high and even though they had just built this brand new wider bridge, it still didn’t seem wide enough! I closed my eyes the entire drive over it! Xander loved it though!
Our first day up in Maine, the day we left Amesbury, we also stopped at Fort Knox! An amazing place to say the least and our very first fort ever! So many great stories and so much wonderful history, we didn’t stay long, but it will be one of those places that we will have to go back to many times to enjoy every thing! The kids loved to just get out of the car and stretch a bit and look at all the new things, especially Xander. He love things like that, mysterious things with lots of things to know and learn. I love that. One day, I hope that I will be able to show my mom this place. She loves history and spooky places, or more like haunted places. She would love this fort.
After leaving the fort, it was about another hour and a half to Ellsworth, where our hotel was. The kids had been eating some good snacks in the car so we decided to stop for some ice cream since they had been sooo AMAZING on our day of driving. It turned into Ice Cream For Dinner Day! It was great, what the kids needed and even with a bit of sugar in their system, they still slept like little angels that night. Who could blame them after all the adventures of the day!
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