Category: Recreation

Holiday Adventures | My list of things I want to do this December.

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‘Tis the season that always seems to go by in a blur. My house is currently covered in boxes filled with Christmas decorations waiting to be unpacked. Decorating is a multi-week endeavor for me. While there never seems to be enough time to do everything on my holiday list, I’m going to give it a shot this year. We’ll see where the holiday spirit takes me and what I can squeeze in this coming month. Below are a few things I’m hoping to do.

Check out some Local Artisans.  I have a brown felt covered advent calendar with perfectly symmetrical numbered tags hanging from hooks on which we place ornaments to count down the days until Christmas. I made it during a crafting weekend with a friend who brought her sizzix die cutting machine and let me play with it. I  often blog about my love for crafting and always get to a few craft shows each season. It’s the best place to find something unique and personal.

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Hiking Maine | Belfast Rail Trail on the Passagassawaukeag

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Fall is one of my favorite times to hike. It’s not too hot and not too cold. Goldilocks would approve. There are some other advantages too including stunning views not impaired by mosquitoes. The conditions are ideal. Unfortunately, since we’ve had a busy few months, we haven’t been hiking as much this season as we would like. So, when we recently went to Belfast for an overnight visit, our first stop was to the Belfast Rail Trail for a quick hike.

After a sad mishap where one of our iPhones went swimming in the lake, we had to make an emergency visit to the wireless store for a temporary replacement. The unplanned stop meant a delayed start to Belfast and by the time we arrived, darkness was only an hour or so away.  This meant we had to do an abridged hike since we were racing the coming darkness.

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Celebrating small, local businesses with the microMaine Trolley Tour

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What do beer, bitters, wool felting, pie and qigong have in common? They were all things we got to try on a unique tour  hosted by Benchmark Residential & Investment Real Estate which focused on micro living in Portland. The tour highlighted smaller local businesses so was different from typical city tours.

The tour started at the Press Hotel which is a cozy themed hotel on Exchange Street. This past March, we did Spirit Quest for Maine Restaurant Week and the Press Hotel had my favorite tasting and cocktail combination. This micro tour also had a food component as we were treated to Korean BBQ vegetable chips and house made carrot & ginger effervescence shooters upon arrival. The carrot and ginger juice, was especially amazing.

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Hiking Maine | Finally made it to the not so secret Seawall Beach in Phippsburg.

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Ever since our visit to Popham Beach in Phippsburg, I have been wanting to head back to the area for a hike at nearby Seawall Beach. Most articles that I have read refer to this spot as a hidden beach since the only access point is by hiking in and then back out. However, after my recent visit, it’s clear that it’s a fairly well-known destination based on the number of other hikers that we encountered on our way to this beautiful beach.

I had romanticized the idea of traveling through the forest on a rarely used, slightly overgrown trail before emerging suddenly from the wilds onto the beach. The treasure at the end of the hike. That is not this hike other than the treasure at the end. The trail is actually a wide road covered in a mixture of asphalt patches and packed dirt. It was easy to follow and not strenuous.

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Four hikes during our weekend at Northern Outdoors in The Forks, Maine

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Moxie Falls was on my bucket list this year. We had visited some waterfalls throughout western Maine last summer, which I blogged about in my post Hiking Maine | Following in the path of the Ultimate Maine Waterfalls Road Trip. There’s something extra fun about hiking when there’s a waterfall at the end of your efforts.

Moxie Falls is one of the highest falls in Maine. It’s located in West Forks which was an area that I wanted to explore.  Since it’s a fair distance from our home, we made a weekend of it and headed to Northern Outdoors, a wonderful, knotty pine covered, rustic camp in The Forks. While they run adventure tours for white water rafting and other excursions, we were focused on hiking for this trip as well as checking another box off our Maine Beer Trail. Kennebec Brewing is located at Northern Outdoors.

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