Find Your Family's Park
If there’s one piece of advice I wish I could give myself when I was a new mom, it’s this: You need a park. Find it fast.
Here’s why - Because when my first baby was little, I spent way too much time googling “fun stuff to do outside with kids”. For years. And way too much time pushing that stroller/pram on my own grass and down our own dirt road, feeling so trapped in my rural Georgia hometown. (Honest to God, I walked around my little yard so many times that first year trying to exercise away the extra 80 pounds I gained being pregnant that our friends commented on the little cattle trail I was creating. Translation: I killed our grass with my incessant walking because I didn’t think I had anywhere else to go to get outside. It was pathetic.)
I needed a park, a playground, a national historic site, anything for outdoor adventures.
A year later, we moved across the globe to Sydney, Australia, and I spent hours every day at my local playground. I met friends there, my son played with other kids, and I didn’t feel trapped anymore as a stay-at-home mom. Then, we moved back to another rural Georgia town a year and a half after that, and I felt trapped again.
It took me a while to realize what was missing – we needed a park.
You probably already know the rest of our story. We spent the next seven years traveling around the US in our Airstream falling in love with America’s National Parks.
We visited 49 states and collected Junior Ranger badges from some of the most amazing national parks in the country. We saw waterfalls, climbed mountains, threw snowballs, moonwalked down sand dunes, and camped under the most beautiful starry skies.
And now we live right on a hiking trail in our favorite national park on the planet – Acadia National Park in Maine.
We love it. I post heaps of photos of Acadia on my Instagram account because we hike or bike or at least walk there pretty much every day. It’s crowded in the summer, but glorious in every season, and it’s completely the reason why I think every family needs a park to call their own – a place to get out and play together, a spot to touch nature, somewhere to come back to again and again and again.
Recently I wrote an article about what it’s like to visit Acadia in every season of the year, and it was published in ROVA Magazine.
If you love Acadia and have always wondered what it would be like to live here or visit in the off-season, check out the article below. (You can click on the photos to make them bigger and purchase a copy of ROVA Issue 28 to read it on real paper here.) Or, if you haven’t found your park yet, here are a few articles that might point you in the right direction:
A list of fun spots all over the US (recommended by Togetherness Redefined email group mamas)
11 Ways to Happily Hit the Trail with Your Family for the First Time
And as always, come over to the email group after to say hi – I love hearing from you more than you know!
