As usual, Day 13 is reserved mostly for the long, sad drive home. First, though, we enjoyed our traditional last-morning breakfast of pastries and coffee at our gazebo, ignoring the fact that we did the very same thing yesterday. We even had the same pastries—a sticky bun for me, a lemon-cheese danish for Rich, and an almond croissant to share. What had seemed a warm morning while we stood chatting with Brandon in the motel parking lot suddenly turned cold and windy as we sat and ate just a few yards from the seawall. I was very glad I hadn’t saved the Cadillac Mountain ride for today! The coffee kept us warm enough, relatively speaking, to finish our pastries. The wind cut short our other longstanding tradition, though. Rather than strolling the Shore Path to the end, we had to be satisfied with yesterday’s short walk along the path. Today it was simply too windy for the walk to be enjoyable.

The drive home was uneventful, and I’m fine with that. Traffic was heavy and, as I’ve said before, I really don’t desire any “adventures” on the highway. (You really don’t want to know how many people we saw texting, reading, or fiddling underneath the passenger seat while driving in very heavy traffic at high speeds on I-495. But I’m sure this is a daily occurrence.) We stopped again at Rein’s, and I drove for a while until my eyes began to blur again. I really need to get some glasses for night driving.

on another trip (I think at the Grand Canyon) I was irritated by the tour buses; so was Rich, but he also remarked that on one hand he was glad to see people at least getting out and learning a little about the world by seeing it firsthand. And he has a point. At least these people are getting out and seeing the world themselves, in the way they can or prefer to, instead of sitting on their butts eating pork rinds or living vicariously through their children or grandchildren or TV characters. We may scoff at their prepackaged “adventures,” but mountaineers who’ve climbed Everest would probably similarly scoff at ours. And I hope they really are adventures for most of these people. Travel may not require the effort it once did, but it can still have some of the same rewards for everyone, at some level.

People ask how we can return to the same spot year after year for vacation (some of these same people do this, but only for “beach vacations” where they don’t really do much other than lie on the beach). However much I may curse the weather where I live (except this year!), one thing I really love about weather is that it’s one of the few remaining forces that we have yet to tame—one thing that prevents our country from the utter homogenization that it is otherwise undergoing. Its impact on our modes of expression and on geology and geography are the only things anymore that keep regions of our country distinct. Even if there were a McDonalds or Starbucks on every corner of every American town, the Maine coast could never evoke the same feelings and experiences as the desert Southwest, humid Florida, or a windswept prairie. And it’s the same force, the impact of weather, that makes each and every visit to Acadia so vastly unique. I’ll always remember this trip as being the one with fantastic weather, where we could make plans the night before and not have to worry much about rain. And we did so much. It was the trip where we went off in search of Julia Child’s cabin one day, and benchmarks on Swans Island the next. The one when we wore our custom “lobster” t-shirts to the lobster pound, even though no one noticed. The one when we could share a few of our favorite places and pass on our love of the park to someone else, John. The one where Rich got back on his feet, so to speak, and was able to hike with me again. I’ve never been so impressed by his courage and perseverance.

So how can we return to the same place each year, without boredom? Well, for one thing, it’s never really the same place. No place remains the same from day to day, but when visits are separated by months it’s like seeing a child only once a year as he grows up—changes that go unnoticed as they accumulate day by day are obvious to the once-a-year visitor. Some of the changes we experience are good: the personal adventures, those dictated by weather, afforded by chance or coincidence or whim; the fact that every time we visit we are different people and therefore see with different eyes; the upgrades to the park and the satisfaction we get from the obvious care the Park Service shows toward maintaining the park for wilderness and for people. Other changes may be, or at least seem, bad: once-quiet restaurants the town overrun with cruise ship passengers and buses, the destruction of quaint decades-old shops and restaurants to make room for a chain hotel right on the waterfront, which will undoubtedly change the character of the area, even if it fails to open the door for other chain establishments. But we really have a relationship with the area now, and that means taking the good with the bad, and seeing what it all can teach us.

We already have some items on our list for next year:

1. Check out the Seaside Path, an old walking path (actually a buckboard road at one point) between the Jordan Pond area and Seal Harbor. It connected the old inns of Seal Harbor to the Jordan Pond House, according to A Walk in the Park.
2. Speaking of Jordan Pond House, Rich should try their lemonade next year. According to several websites, not only is it fresh squeezed, but it comes unsweetened with a little pitcher of simple syrup on the side, just as Rich has been saying he’d like it.
3. Create and bring our own moose decal to place somewhere that it can be viewed via webcam. Sorry, but I can’t be more specific than that!