Maine & New England trip planning

A Maine itinerary built by locals,
not a listicle

Pick your dates, your people and what you love. In about five minutes you get a day-by-day plan with real drive times, seasonal warnings and the notes a local friend would give you.

Plan my trip — from $19Read a full sample
Written in about 5 minutes · Printable & emailed · Revision included on $29+ · 14-day guarantee

Maine is bigger than the map

Portland to Bar Harbor is three hours before the first stop. We build around real drive times so you see Maine, not the windshield.

The season decides the trip

Black flies, Route 1 traffic, Cadillac reservations, early foliage inland. Every plan carries the warnings for your dates.

Live-checked before delivery

We web-check the named spots in your plan and flag anything that appears to have closed — so it's still right the morning you leave.

How it works

Three steps to a plan you can drive

About four minutes of questions. The more you tell us — kid ages, a bad knee, a lobster obsession, a dog — the better the plan.

1

Describe the trip

Dates or season, number of days, who is coming, one base or a road trip, relaxed or packed, interests, budget, must-sees and must-avoids, and whether you have been before.

2

Pick a tier

Day-by-day itinerary for $19. Add a revision for $29. The $39 Trip Kit adds printable per-day cards and a restaurant & lodging shortlist. Secure checkout by Stripe.

3

Read, revise, print

Days appear one at a time as they are written. Send revision notes if you have them, then print to PDF or keep the link on your phone. It is also emailed to you.

Full sample

Three days, a couple, midcoast + Acadia, September

This is a complete itinerary as delivered — not an excerpt. Yours is written for your answers.

Midcoast & Acadia in September — Couple, 3 days, Balanced paceMid-September

Base: Road trip: 1 night Camden, 1 night Bar Harbor  ·  Interests: lobster & food, lighthouses, easy hikes, art

Day 1

Portland to Camden — lighthouses, Route 1 and the Farnsworth

🚗 About 2½ hours of driving total: Portland → Cape Elizabeth 20 min · Cape Elizabeth → Bath 50 min · Bath → Rockland 1 hr · Rockland → Camden 15 min
Morning

Start at Portland Head Light in Fort Williams Park, Cape Elizabeth — the postcard Maine lighthouse, and the grounds are free to walk. Go early; the light is best before the tour buses. Back in Portland, grab a coffee in the Old Port and pick up I-295 north to Brunswick, then join Route 1 at Bath. In September the Wiscasset bridge bottleneck is mild on a weekday; if the line at Red's Eats is long, Sprague's Lobster across the street serves a comparable roll with a shorter wait (verify current hours — both are seasonal).

Afternoon

Continue up Route 1 to Rockland. Spend 90 minutes at the Farnsworth Art Museum (three generations of Wyeths, plus Louise Nevelson), then walk the Rockland Breakwater — seven-eighths of a mile of granite blocks out to the lighthouse, flat but uneven, about 45 minutes round trip. Skip it in fog or big swell.

Evening

Fifteen minutes north to Camden. Check in, then walk the harbor: the schooner fleet is still in the water in September and the light on Penobscot Bay is at its best around 6 pm. Dinner in town — September evenings fill up, so reserve earlier in the day. If you have energy, the short walk along Bay View Street past the yacht club is the local's after-dinner stroll.

Locals' note: Camden lodging: in-town inns put you within walking distance of everything; the Route 1 motels just north are quieter and cheaper. Rainy-day alternate: swap the breakwater for the Owls Head Transportation Museum (working antique planes and cars, kid-and-adult friendly).
🔒 Day 2 — Camden to Acadia — Mount Battie, the Penobscot Narrows and the Park Loop Road
🔒 Day 3 — Cadillac sunrise, the quiet side and a lobster pound on the way out
…each written to the same depth, plus the full "Before You Go" section — seasonal warnings, packing list, rainy-day alternates and locals' notes. Yours is written for your trip →

Every itinerary also includes a "Before You Go" section: seasonal warnings, rainy-day alternates, packing list, reservations to make now, and locals' notes.

Signature trips

Or build the whole trip around one idea

Pick a style instead of a region and we thread it through every day — with the ferry timing, seasonal flow and footing warnings that make these trips actually work.

The Lighthouse Trail

Nubble to West Quoddy: Portland Head, Pemaquid Point, Marshall Point, Owls Head, the Rockland Breakwater walk, Bass Harbor on Acadia's quiet side — ordered so the driving makes sense, with the photo-light hours and the fog truth included.

The Waterfall Tour

Moxie Falls near The Forks, Smalls Falls off Route 4, Grafton Notch's gorges, Sabbaday on the Kancamagus. Best in spring runoff, honest about late-summer trickles, and clear about which gravel roads your car will hate.

Island Hopping

Peaks by bike, Monhegan's cliff trails, Vinalhaven by car ferry, Swans Island and Isle au Haut for the quiet. Built around real ferry logic — because on the islands, the boat schedule is the itinerary.

Beach Days

The famous sand — Ogunquit, Old Orchard, York — and the ones locals keep quieter: Reid's warm lagoon, Higgins' low-tide shipwreck, Jasper Beach's polished stones Downeast. With the parking truths, the tide timing and the warm freshwater swims for when the ocean bites.

Where we plan

Maine first, then the rest of northern New England

Pick one region for a long weekend or string several together for a road trip. We tell you when you are trying to do too much.

Portland & Casco BayFood, breweries, Old Port, ferries to the islands
Southern Maine beachesKittery, Ogunquit, Kennebunkport, Old Orchard Beach
MidcoastBath, Boothbay, Damariscotta, Rockland, Camden, Belfast
Acadia & Mount Desert IslandBar Harbor, Park Loop Road, the quiet side, Schoodic
Downeast & Bold CoastMachias, Cutler, Lubec, Eastport, Campobello
Lakes regionSebago, Belgrade Lakes, Rangeley, Moosehead
Western mountainsBethel, Sugarloaf, Rangeley, Grafton Notch
Katahdin & Baxter State ParkMillinocket, Katahdin Woods & Waters, the Golden Road
NH White MountainsNorth Conway, Franconia Notch, Kancamagus Highway
VermontStowe, Woodstock, Burlington, Northeast Kingdom
Cape Cod & the islandsOuter Cape, Provincetown, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard
Pricing

One payment. No subscription.

A human trip planner charges hundreds and takes a week. A guidebook is three years old. Northbound is written for you, tonight.

Day-by-day Itinerary

$19
one trip, one-time
  • Up to 14 days, morning / afternoon / evening
  • Driving times between stops
  • Seasonal warnings for your dates
  • Rainy-day alternates each day
  • Packing list & reservations-to-make-now
  • Locals' notes section
  • Live web check on the named spots before delivery
  • Printable PDF, Markdown, email
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Itinerary + 1 Revision

$29
itinerary + one full rewrite
  • Everything in the itinerary
  • Send notes after reading the first draft
  • Whole plan rewritten with your notes and the previous draft in hand
  • Previous draft kept for comparison
Get itinerary + revision

Trip Kit

$39
the glovebox version
  • Everything in itinerary + revision
  • Printable one-page-per-day cards, big type
  • Restaurant & lodging shortlist by town
  • $ / $$ / $$$ tiers and booking notes
Get the Trip Kit

14-day money-back guarantee if the plan is unusable for your trip. Secure checkout by Stripe.

Guide

How to plan a Maine trip that doesn't spend itself in the car

Most people planning a first trip to Maine make the same mistake: they open a map, see that Portland, Acadia and the lighthouses are all "on the coast", and try to do all of it in four days. Then they discover that Route 1 is a two-lane road through every town center between Bath and Ellsworth, that Bar Harbor is three hours from Portland before the first stop, and that Downeast is a different trip entirely. A good Maine itinerary is mostly about choosing what to leave out.

Pick a shape: one base or a road trip

With three or four days, a single base wins. Camden or Rockland puts the whole midcoast — Boothbay, Damariscotta, the Farnsworth, the breakwater, the schooners — within an hour. Bar Harbor or the quiet side of Mount Desert Island gives you Acadia without a daily drive. Portland alone is a genuinely good long weekend of food, breweries, Casco Bay islands and Portland Head Light. With five days or more, a road trip makes sense: south to north up the coast, or coast plus one inland leg into the lakes, the western mountains or the White Mountains.

Let the season set the plan

September is the local favorite — warm days, cool nights, thin crowds after Labor Day, everything still open. July and August are the warmest and the busiest; book lodging months out and expect lines at the famous lobster shacks. Late May and June are lovely on the coast and buggy inland. Foliage peaks in the mountains and the far north around the turn of October, then works its way to the coast by mid-to-late October, and many seasonal businesses close between Columbus Day and Halloween. Mud season (late March into April) is the one time we tell people to wait.

Acadia needs a plan of its own

Acadia is one of the most visited national parks in the country. Driving to the Cadillac Mountain summit requires a timed vehicle reservation through the reservation season, and the sunrise slots go first. The Park Loop Road lots at Sand Beach, Thunder Hole and Jordan Pond fill by mid-morning in summer; the free Island Explorer shuttle solves that. Thunder Hole only thunders in the couple of hours before high tide. The Beehive and Precipice trails have iron rungs and real exposure — spectacular for the sure-footed, wrong for small kids and anyone nervous about heights, which is why every Northbound plan asks about your party before naming a trail. The quiet side (Southwest Harbor, Bass Harbor) and the Schoodic Peninsula are the same park with a fraction of the people.

Lobster: pound versus restaurant

A lobster pound is a working dock with picnic tables: pick your lobster, pay by weight, crack it yourself, bring your own drinks. A lobster restaurant is table service with a bigger menu. They are different experiences and worth doing both. The famous roll with the hour-long line is rarely better than the less famous one across the street; a good itinerary tells you which is which.

Beyond Maine

The White Mountains are two-plus hours from Portland and combine well with the western Maine lakes; the Kancamagus is gorgeous and gridlocked on foliage weekends, so we send you on a weekday or early. Vermont's color runs a week or two ahead of the coast. Cape Cod is its own trip — the bridges are the whole story on summer weekends — and we plan it the same way: real drive times, real seasonal warnings, and a short list of what to verify before you go.

FAQ

Questions travelers ask before ordering

Is this a real itinerary or a generic list of attractions?

It is a day-by-day plan written for your dates, your party and your interests, built around real driving times and the practical local knowledge we feed into every plan: where Route 1 backs up, when Acadia's summit road needs a reservation, which trails have ladders, when the lobster shacks close for the season. Every place named is a real town, trailhead, park, museum or long-established business.

Who actually writes it?

The plan is drafted by an AI writer working from a detailed local-knowledge brief written by a Mainer who has driven every one of these roads, plus strict rules: name real places, never invent hours or prices, prefer well-known spots so nobody gets sent to a business that has closed. You get the plan in minutes rather than waiting a week for a human planner.

How do you handle hours, prices and schedules?

We do not state them. Restaurant hours, park fees, ferry times and reservation windows change every season, so the itinerary tells you exactly what to verify and when ("seasonal — check current hours", "book the Cadillac Summit Road reservation before you arrive"). The plan is the route and the reasoning; a two-minute check before each stop keeps it current.

What is a revision?

After you read the first draft you can send notes — "swap the hike for a boat trip", "we're staying in Rockland not Camden", "less driving on day 3" — and the whole itinerary is rewritten with your original answers, your notes and the previous draft in hand. The $29 and $39 tiers include one revision; the $19 itinerary does not.

What is in the Trip Kit?

Everything in the $29 tier plus a printable one-page-per-day card set (big type, just that day's plan and driving legs, meant to sit on the dashboard) and a restaurant and lodging shortlist organized by the towns you will actually be in, with $ / $$ / $$$ tiers and booking notes.

How far ahead should I order?

Any time, but the plan is most useful before you book lodging, because it tells you which towns to sleep in and for how many nights. For summer and foliage trips, that means months ahead — coastal inns fill early and Acadia's summit reservations open on a rolling window.

Do you cover places outside Maine?

Yes: the New Hampshire White Mountains, Vermont, and Cape Cod and the islands, on their own or combined with Maine. Maine is the deepest coverage — coast, Acadia, Portland, midcoast, lakes, western mountains, Downeast, and Katahdin/Baxter.

Can I get a refund?

If the itinerary is unusable for your trip — it ignores your must-avoid list, sends you somewhere your party cannot go, or generation failed — email us within 14 days and we will refund you in full. Most fixes are faster as a revision.

Is my information used for anything else?

No. Your answers are used to write your itinerary and stored with your order so you can reopen the link. We do not sell data and the AI providers we use do not train on it.

Have your Maine trip planned tonight

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