Yesterday in Part 1 we ate our way from a comeback-story shack on the Plum Island Turnpike to a round bun on a bridge in Kennebunkport. Today we finish the trail, and we finish the thought underneath it. Because this series is supposed to be the fun one, and it is, but there is one serious question hiding in all this melted butter. We will get to it on top of a mountain.
Stop 5: Erica's Seafood, Harpswell, Maine
From Brunswick, take Route 123 south for twelve miles. Two-lane road, pine trees, flashes of blue water between the trunks. Turn right on Ash Point Road, then right again onto Basin Point Road, and keep going as the peninsula narrows until there is water on both sides and you are fairly sure you are driving off the end of the world. At the end of the road: Erica's Seafood, a small shack with a hand-painted sign on a grass knoll above a working lobster dock, run by Tom Butler, Andrea Hunter, and their daughter Erica.
Three rules before you go. It is cash only, and there is no ATM at the end of a peninsula. They do not sell drinks, so bring your own cooler and nobody will blink. And they are closed Wednesdays. Now the roll: there is no mayo here. No lettuce, no celery, no seasoning. Just a mound of fresh-picked lobster on a roll, with a cup of Kate's sea salt butter on the side, made about an hour up the road. A humble shack that quietly hands you the best butter in New England. You dip, you drizzle, you sit at a brightly painted picnic table, and you watch the boat that caught your lunch head back out for tomorrow's.
This is the quietest stop on the trail. That is the point of it. Yesterday's stops had crowds and gift shops. Basin Point has water on three sides and time on all of them. Take the walk out to the point before you leave.
Stop 6: A bench in Camden
Two hours up the coast, Camden is where the mountains meet the sea. Mount Battie rises 800 feet directly behind the harbor, the Megunticook River tumbles over the rocks right in the middle of downtown, and the harbor is full of windjammers. The schooner Lewis R. French is one of the oldest commercial sailing vessels in America. The Olad was built in 1927 and still takes passengers out every afternoon in season.
Here is my specific recommendation, and it costs nothing. There are thirty memorial benches along the public landing. Take one. Listen to the halyards clanging against the masts, which is the sound Camden makes. Sooner or later somebody sits down on the other end of the bench, and you find out they retired five years ago, or they are about to, or they never quite will, and you have the kind of conversation with a stranger that you have not had since college. Our advisors hear a version of this all the time: the people who are happiest in retirement are not the ones who found the perfect hobby. They are the ones who stopped apologizing for enjoying their own life. You can spot them on the benches in Camden. They are not checking their phones.
Do you need a reservation for sunrise on Cadillac Mountain?
Yes. From late May through late October, driving up Cadillac Mountain requires a timed vehicle reservation from recreation.gov, and the sunrise window is the one that sells out. It costs six dollars plus a four dollar processing fee, ten dollars total, on top of your park pass. Thirty percent of the slots open 90 days ahead and the other seventy percent open two days ahead, both at 10 AM Eastern, and summer sunrise slots go fast. Set an alarm for the release the same way you would for concert tickets.
Stop 7: The top of Cadillac Mountain
Cadillac is the highest point on the Atlantic coast of the United States, 1,530 feet of bare pink granite above Bar Harbor. For the sunrise you will wake up at 3:30 in the morning on vacation, which sounds insane, and join a line of headlights snaking up a mountain in the dark, which also sounds insane. Do it anyway.
Here is the honest footnote, because we verify things around here even on the fun weekends. People will tell you Cadillac is the first place in America to see the sunrise. In July, it technically is not. That honor belongs to Mars Hill, a town about 150 miles northeast. Cadillac only holds the title from early October to early March. Does any of that matter when the horizon goes from indigo to amber and the sun breaks over the Atlantic while 400 strangers hold their breath at the same time? Not even a little.
The dawn itself lasts about two minutes. Somebody gasps. Somebody claps. Then it is quiet again, and within ten minutes most of the crowd heads down for blueberry pancakes and you have the summit nearly to yourself. Walk the loop trail. Bar Harbor sits below you like a model village, the islands scatter across Frenchman Bay, and the whole coastline you just spent two days eating your way up is laid out in the morning light.
What was all the saving for?
Now the serious question, and then I will let you go enjoy your Sunday.
Add up this entire trail. Every lobster roll from Newbury to Bar Harbor, the gas, three nights in decent hotels, the gift shop, the ten dollar sunrise reservation. For two people you are in it for well under a thousand dollars. Most of the folks who sit down with our advisors could fund this trip out of one month's interest and never notice. And yet the hardest conversation in retirement planning is not about markets or taxes. It is convincing someone who saved diligently for four decades that they are now allowed to spend some of it on a thirty dollar sandwich without feeling like they did something wrong.
You did the work. You packed the lunches, you ate at your desk, you drove past places like these for forty years on the way to somewhere you had to be. The plan was never just to have money. The plan was to prepare what you have, protect it, and then make sure it lasts as long as you do, and the last part of that sentence is you. Living. At a picnic table, at the end of a peninsula, on a bench in Camden, on top of a mountain at 5 AM.
Monday we will be back to the serious work. This weekend, go find your lobster roll.
P.S. The novel is coming along. The husband in it just ate at Bob Lobster and has no idea what is about to happen to him in Harpswell. Working title still TBD.