Across the State Line — Breaking Camp for the Omni Mount Washington

New England Road Trip 2026 · Acadia, Maine → Bretton Woods, New Hampshire · Tuesday, June 9

Three nights of tent camping in Acadia, and then it was time for the biggest contrast of the trip: tear down the campsite at Blackwoods and drive west to a grand old mountain resort in New Hampshire. From a tarp over a picnic table to the Omni Mount Washington in one day — that's the kind of range a road trip gives you.

Breaking camp

Teardown with two kids always runs a little past your target departure time, and that's fine — we rolled out of Blackwoods a touch after 9, which still left the day wide open. About four and a half hours and 240-some miles lay ahead, mostly down I-95 and then west into the mountains. (Standard note for our crew: the back half of this drive gets winding through western Maine, so the motion-sickness meds rode shotgun.)

A travel-day lunch (the honest version)

The plan had been a wood-fired-pizza-and-craft-beer stop in Augusta. But travel days have their own logic, and when you're making good time with a hungry car, sometimes the right answer is the un-fancy one. We cruised right past the brewery and pulled into a Hannaford instead — a bathroom break and a quick, cheap, everybody-can-eat lunch. Not a blog-glamour moment, but exactly what the day needed. (I'll cop to it: the supermarket lunch was the move.)

From there it was west through Lewiston and up into the western Maine mountains near Bethel — the landscape shifting from coast to genuine high country — then across the line into New Hampshire and the northern Presidentials.

Arriving at the grand hotel

We rolled into Bretton Woods around 3:15, ahead of check-in, and the Omni Mount Washington Resort does not undersell itself. It's one of those enormous early-1900s white-and-red-roofed grand hotels, sitting right at the foot of the Presidential Range with Mount Washington looming behind it. After three nights in a tent, walking into the Great Hall felt almost comically luxurious — and the kids' eyes went wide, which is half the fun.

We kept the first evening easy: dropped our stuff, let the kids loose at the pool and the creek out back (cold mountain water, slippery rocks — water shoes earned their place), and had a casual dinner at the Rosebrook Bar right off the Great Hall — pizzas and mini-burgers with mountain views, no reservation needed. The fancy main dining room could wait.

The reason we were here was locked for the morning, though, and I laid out the warm layers before bed: tomorrow we ride the Cog Railway to the top of Mount Washington.

Up next → cog-and-cylinder up the Northeast's highest peak, then a rainy, easy last day in the notch.