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  • Fall Road Trip Packing List: What To Actually Bring

    Fall road trips are my favorite kind of road trip, and I say that as someone who lives in a truck-and-trailer combo 365 days a year. The light is better, the crowds thin out by mid-week, the dogs stop ...

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    Fall Road Trip Packing List: What To Actually Bring
  • The Ultimate Dog Hiking Gear List For National Parks

    If you're anything like me, your dog is your favorite hiking partner, and honestly? They're probably better at it than you are. Loki, Freya, and Caly have logged thousands of trail miles with us ...

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    The Ultimate Dog Hiking Gear List For National Parks
  • The Ultimate New England Fall Road Trip: A Six-State Foliage Loop (2026)

    I lived in New England for 7 years, which means I experienced 7 autumns. Seven rounds of watching the whole region turn absolutely feral with color for about three weeks and then go quiet for the ...

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    The Ultimate New England Fall Road Trip: A Six-State Foliage Loop (2026)
  • The Girls Trip Guide to Bar Harbor & Acadia National Park

    An honest, all-seasons guide from someone who lived there for six months I need to set expectations right up front, because I'd rather you hear this from me than find out at 9:30 on a Saturday ...

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    The Girls Trip Guide to Bar Harbor & Acadia National Park

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September 29, 2026

Fall Road Trip Packing List: What To Actually Bring

Fall road trips are my favorite kind of road trip, and I say that as someone who lives in a truck-and-trailer combo 365 days a year. The light is better, the crowds thin out by mid-week, the dogs stop overheating,…

Read More

September 22, 2026

The Ultimate Dog Hiking Gear List For National Parks

Loki, Freya, and Caly on a Maine beach

Three dogs, 20+ National Parks, and a lot of trial and error. This is the dog hiking packing list I actually use every time we hit the trail, including the Acadia-specific add-ons that matter.

September 15, 2026

The Ultimate New England Fall Road Trip: A Six-State Foliage Loop (2026)

white church in autumn woodstock vermont

Seven autumns in New England taught me the trip most people get wrong. Here’s the six-state loop routed the way the color actually moves, with 2026 road closures, booking deadlines, and dog rules.

September 4, 2026

The Girls Trip Guide to Bar Harbor & Acadia National Park

Girls trip to Acadia National Park: four friends posing on Ocean Path near Otter Cliff with pink granite rocks, Frenchman Bay, and fall foliage on the Bar Harbor, Maine coastline, cover photo for The Well Worn Shoes girls trip guide to Acadia and Bar Harbor.

Bar Harbor is the rare girls trip destination where everyone gets what they came for: the friend who wants to hike the Beehive, the friend who wants a lobster roll and a nap, and the friend who booked the whale watch before anyone agreed to it. This guide covers where to stay, which hikes are worth the early alarm, the best sunset spots on the quiet side, where to drink after dinner, and a day-by-day itinerary so nobody has to be the planner. Cadillac sunrise included. You’ll cry. That’s normal.

August 18, 2026

Acadia National Park October Guide: Fall Colors, Weather & What to Pack

Bright red maple leaf featured over autumn Maine waterway

October in Acadia is Disney World busy, and worth it anyway. Here’s what actually matters: when peak foliage really hits (later than you think), how to get a Cadillac Mountain reservation, why most people miss the Island Explorer cutoff, and the late-October cheat code nobody talks about.

July 22, 2026

The Bar Harbor Cheat Sheet: Everything You Need To Know Before You Visit

Downtown Bar Harbor's walkable shopping streets in Maine — featured image for a complete Bar Harbor and Acadia travel guide, capturing the village's shops, benches, and small-town charm.

Bar Harbor, Maine, is one of those places that grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go. I’ve been visiting Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park for years, but in the summer of 2025, I moved there for 6 months and have all the insider details…

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Hi! I'm Vanessa, a 30 something, sunset chasing traveler. I'm here to inspire you to travel wherever, whenever, and with whoever you can. My Huskies, Loki and Freya are usually along for the ride. I have a soul that likes to wander, a desire to experience the unknown, and a curiousity to discover things off the beaten path. I hope you'll stick around for awhile!

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Recent Posts

  • Fall Road Trip Packing List: What To Actually Bring
  • The Ultimate Dog Hiking Gear List For National Parks
  • The Ultimate New England Fall Road Trip: A Six-State Foliage Loop (2026)
  • The Girls Trip Guide to Bar Harbor & Acadia National Park
  • Acadia National Park October Guide: Fall Colors, Weather & What to Pack

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Best sunset spots in Acadia National Park - featured image of a pastel pink and purple sunset over Seal Cove with a lobster boat and seaweed-covered low-tide ledges, a guide to the most peaceful, crowd-free sunset viewing spots on the quiet side of Mount Desert Island, Maine

The Best Sunset Spots in Acadia National Park

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I didn’t expect much from the Upper Peninsula. The I didn’t expect much from the Upper Peninsula. Then I spent a day in a fairytale forest chasing waterfalls.

Sable Falls: 168 stairs to Lake Superior.
Miners Falls: an easy mile through the northwoods to a 40-foot drop.
Tahquamenon: 200 feet wide, root-beer brown

And then a ranger told me about Laughing Whitefish Falls on the way to dinner. It wasn’t even on my lis5, and somehow became my favorite waterfall in Michigan.

Fall is the best time to do this. Nobody tells you that about the UP either!

Save this for next October or this one if you’re already planning! The full waterfall day, with trail lengths, passes, and dog rules is on the blog.
10+ years ago, I started saving pictures of camper 10+ years ago, I started saving pictures of camper vans. Today, I bought one. 😂

Meet the newest member of our already questionable travel plan: a Ram ProMaster 2500, high roof, completely empty.

No bed. No kitchen. No cabinets.

So naturally, we’re going to build it ourselves, and document the good ideas, bad ideas, and decisions we’ll absolutely regret.

3 years of full-time RV life taught us something: the places we love most are usually the places Betty can’t go.

National Forest campgrounds. State parks. Tiny NPS loops. Forest roads that look at a 40-foot travel trailer and say, “absolutely not.”

Betty stays home.
The van gets the weekends. 
Loki is a huge fan! 😂

Two humans. Three dogs. One 40-foot RV. One completely empty van. 

Because apparently one home on wheels wasn’t enough. 

She doesn’t have a name yet.

So…what should we call her? 👀
I lived less than an hour from Salem for 7 years, I lived less than an hour from Salem for 7 years, and every October I watched the same thing: people driving downtown, circling for parking, and spending the day in the Witch Museum line.

A million visitors. One town of 45,000. Halloween on a Saturday and the 400th anniversary this year. It’s going to be a lot.

So I wrote the version I’d hand a friend or tell them over coffee, because that’s what I do here ☕️ 

Two different guides, actually. 

🎃👻 The Salem in October Cheat Sheet is 6 pages you keep on your phone: the train, the ticket release times, the Halloween-night rules, one perfect weekday hour by hour, and the real Hocus Pocus addresses. 

🍁🎃 The Ultimate Salem Guide is the whole thing the shops, the food and cider, the dog version, where to actually sleep, the 1692 history, and the other eleven months.

Comment Witch and I’ll send you links to the Cheat Sheet ($), Ultimate Guide ($), and 10 of my free blog posts about visiting Salem in October! 🎃🍁
There’s a national park where wild horses wander d There’s a national park where wild horses wander down the middle of the road at sunset, and somehow, most people still don’t know where it is.

📍 🦬 Theodore Roosevelt National Park, western North Dakota.

Wild horses. Bison standing in the road at dusk. A herd disappearing into the river fog at sunset. The moon coming up over the badlands.

And you can see a ridiculous amount of it in 48 hours.

No reservations. No lines. Just the Loop Road, a whole lot of badlands, and bison who absolutely do not care that you’re in a hurry.

✨ Save this for the I-94 drive you were about to do in one shot ✨
4 million people visit Acadia every year, and the 4 million people visit Acadia every year, and the vast majority never leave Mount Desert Island. The part they all skip is the part I’d send you to if you’re looking for tranquility over crowds. 

Schoodic is the only piece of the park on the mainland, about an hour from Bar Harbor around the top of Frenchman Bay. 

Six-mile one-way loop road, no reservation, no Island Explorer crowds, no timed anything. Schoodic Point is the payoff: pink granite and black basalt dikes taking the full Atlantic, and on a big-swell day it’s the best show in the park. Dogs on leash are fine on the rocks and the trails.

Look back across the bay from the point and you can see Cadillac. That’s where everyone else is. But this spot is fantastic for sunset! 

🌅 Save this. Then don’t tell anyone 😉 

⚠️‼️ Before people come for me in the comments because they inevitably will - The Schoodic Peninsula is a PART of Acadia National Park and the National Park System (not a secret), and therefore it has the resources to sustain visitors. Most people don’t visit this part of the park because they don’t want to drive an hour, while I understand, respectfully you’re missing out! ⚠️‼️

🌲🌱 Remember to leave no trace 💚
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