During a 35day roadtrip through 23 states, we planned a 4 1/2 day mini adventure in Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. The planning started months prior, as we battled online for slots at Cadillac Mountain’s sunrise, hotly contested spots at Acadia’s Blackwood Campground, and seats for the Bar Harbor Whale Watching tour. We were so exhausted that we left after only three days. This video was made in an effort to keep your stamina up as you experience one of Maine’s most coveted points of interest. Don’t get run over like we did.

First things first: Get on Recreation.gov and figure out when to reserve your dates for Cadillac Mountain. There are TWO slots one just for the sunrise experience and one for regular piddling around on the mountaintop during regular hours of operation.

If you really, really need to camp in Acadia National Park, you will likely go for Blackwoods Campground. If you look on a map, the camp is perfectly located in the middle of all the bigger points of interest (Thunder Hole, Precipice Trail, Cadillac Mountain, and the town of Bar Harbor). Although the area is absolutely beautiful, there’s still so much traffic that you may feel compelled to take a vehicle to many of those locations anyway. But, if realizing that you’ll end up car anyway doesn’t discourage you, maybe the fact that dragging your camper in a primitive campground will. No power with limited generator hours, no water and no showers in the community bathroom, no sewer, tight spaces due to trees, ridiculous levels with no pads or gravel sounds fun. So why is it so hard to get a site? We battled online for days to secure a location on Recreation.gov. You aren’t aloud to book a camping space until you’re 60 days out. We did find a simple cheat to provide more opportunities to secure a site. In fact, once we did, we accidentally grabbed two sites at the same time. If you’re interested, let me know in the comments.

Want to cruise Maine’s gulf coast in search of whales? One word: Dramamine. We forgot…we got sick. But, it wasn’t that simple. Getting sick for five hours causes dehydration and exhaustion. We never recovered. In fact, due to bad timing, we made it worse by waking up at 3 a.m. the next morning to see the sunrise on Cadillac Mountain. Those two events, side by side, sucker punched the entire family to the point where we stayed at camp on day three and left a day early.


Music used under licensed permission with iMovie royalty free soundtrack library.