Road tripping to Maine - Boothbay Harbor

We woke up this morning after having slept sooo well the night before.  Mid-50s, no humidity, windows open.  Sunday brunch didn't start until 8am and our usual 6am wake up call came as expected in the form of Kate and Summer.  So, we popped them into the stroller and set out to explore Boothbay Harbor on a run.   We discovered a beautiful resort (much, much nicer than ours, although I'm sure also MUCH more expensive..), the Spruce Point Inn Resort and Spa.  They had a beautiful setting, right on the water.  We stopped and admired the view and all the sailboats and little islands we could see out in the distance.  We didn't linger long, and headed back to the Sprucewold Lodge for breakfast because we knew we had a big day ahead of us.

Somehow, I had come across the website for the Boothbay Harbor Botanical Gardens.  This wouldn't be a normal "pick" for something we would want to do, but the words, "fairy weekend in the children's garden" caught my eye.  We headed there and ended up having the most fun.  First, the girls got their faces painted.

 

Next, they donned fairy wings and enjoyed some fairy story telling.

After that, they flitted about the gardens, admiring the turtles, fish, flowers, and even some fountains made to look like whales - complete with blowholes!  They also had a bronze statue of the little bear from "Blueberries for Sal", which is one of the girl's favorite books.

Next was fairy yoga, a fairy puppet show and our one and only celebrity sighting of the trip to Maine...

Mike ran out to the car to get a snack for us and on his way back in, he saw a guy paying for tickets that he thought he recognized.  He soon realized it was Wayne Jarvis from Arrested Development!  He's a character that is only in a few episodes, but Mike picked him out right away.  He's been in a ton of movies, but we also recognized him from Best in Show.  He was there with his family - a pretty cool sighting for us!

We had lunch at the botanical gardens then headed back for Summer's nap.  She was not very happy to nap in a lodge room by herself, so I loaded the girls up in the stroller and we went exploring.  You can always get summer to sleep in the stroller, she just doesn't nap very long in there!  Boothbay Harbor  was a beautiful place, although in my mind, the best part came next. 

After naps, we went looking for beaches.  My trusty dusty Fodor's book told me there were two public beaches, one on the peninsula just north of where we were and one on the peninsula south.  We headed north, because you could see a storm coming from the south.  We figured heading north would buy us some time.  We got to the beach and within 10 minutes it was booming thunder.  We left and headed into town for an early dinner.  After dinner, it was beautiful out.  We headed to the other beach this time and had the best time.  For me, it was one of my most favorite parts of our vacation.  

This beach was at the mouth of the Sheepscot river, and had a pretty view of the Hendricks Head Lighthouse.  These pictures are all from my phone, so I don't have a good shot of the lighthouse here.  This beach was so serene when we were there, with calm waters and really cool cloud cover.  The girls loved climbing on the big rocks, finding creatures in the tidal pools and searching for lobstah :)