Every July, a group of us heads up to Maine for our annual Saco River camping trip. It has become one of those weekends that everyone looks forward to all year. We spend months talking about it, planning food, buying new gear we probably don't need, and counting down until it's finally time to leave.

This year was no different.

Well... maybe a little different.

Originally there were supposed to be seventeen of us going, but life had other plans. Between illnesses, work, and life getting in the way, six people had to cancel at the last minute. We ended up with eleven, and honestly... I think it might have made the weekend even better.

Friday morning started out exactly the way I didn't want it to.

I already had that anxious feeling you get before a trip when you're trying to remember if you packed everything. Then my son forgot to get Carter's dog food, so I had to add one more errand to the list before we could leave.

On top of that, it was Carter's first time being boarded.

If you've ever dropped your dog off somewhere for the first time, you probably know exactly how I felt. I was worried the whole morning wondering if he'd be okay.

Between running errands, packing the car, and making sure I wasn't forgetting anything, I felt like I was running a marathon before we had even left the driveway.

Eventually my daughter and I climbed into my tiny Hyundai that was packed so full there was barely any room left for us.

Finally...

We were on our way.

Of course, traffic had other ideas.

About four hours later we finally rolled into camp.

As people slowly started arriving, all four campsites turned into organized chaos.

Everyone was unpacking.

Tents were going up.

Coolers were getting unloaded and reloaded.

People were trying to remember where they packed things.

Someone was always asking, "Has anyone seen..."

You know... camping.

Even after making this trip for years, the first couple of hours always feel hectic. Somehow, though, by the end of the day the campsites stop looking like a pile of random camping gear and start feeling like home.

Then came our first challenge.

Ice.

Apparently everyone in Maine wanted ice that weekend because almost every place around us was sold out.

After we got camp mostly set up, my daughter and I jumped back in the car and drove around looking for some. Over thirty minutes later we finally found one place that still had ice.

We bought twelve bags.

Was that excessive?

Probably.

Did we use it?

Absolutely.

We felt like we'd won the lottery.

Friday night everyone pretty much made their own dinners while still helping each other get settled in.

That's one of my favorite things about camping with a group.

Nobody really has to ask for help.

If someone needs a hand carrying something, another person is already helping.

If someone's grill isn't working, someone else has one.

If somebody forgot something, odds are another person packed two.

Unfortunately, our neighbors...

Well...

Let's just say they weren't quite there for the peaceful camping experience.

The campsites next to ours had what had to be around forty to fifty people.

They were watching FIFA, partying, laughing, and having a great time.

Honestly, I love seeing people having fun.

The problem was it never stopped.

Quiet hours at the campground start at ten o'clock, so we all figured they'd settle down around then.

Nope.

Jeff, the campground manager, who by the way is literally the only person who works there, came over two or three times asking them to quiet down because people were complaining.

Nothing changed.

One of our friends who was camping with our group finally gave up, left, and checked into a hotel because it was just that loud.

I honestly felt bad for Jeff.

Imagine being one guy trying to handle that many people.

Around 12:30 enough was enough, and Jeff finally called the police.

I crawled into my tent hoping that would be the end of it.

It wasn't.

Even after the police left, people were blowing up air mattresses and making noise until around 1:30 in the morning.

Then the police came back around two because apparently there were more issues near the bathrooms.

Meanwhile, I'm laying in my tent needing to pee but deciding I'd rather just wait.

Around 4:30 I was cold and could not hold it anymore. I finally gave in and walked to the bathroom.

For the first time all night...

Silence.

The campground was completely still.

I remember thinking, "Finally."

Then about an hour and a half later people started waking up.

If I got three hours of sleep that night, I'd be surprised.

Needless to say...

We were all running on fumes.

What happened next honestly surprised all of us.

Jeff had gone over that morning and told the neighboring campsites they needed to leave.

A little while later, several of them walked over to our campsite.

Not to argue.

To apologize.

They admitted they had gotten way out of hand the night before.

They even offered to pay for our friend's hotel room.

Then they asked if we'd be okay with them staying if Jeff decided to let them.

Now, whether they stayed or not wasn't our decision.

That was completely up to Jeff.

But I'll tell you this.

It takes a lot to admit when you've messed up.

I respected them for walking over and apologizing.

Jeff ended up letting them stay.

They promised there wouldn't be another issue all weekend.

And you know what?

They kept their word.

Looking back now, I think that apology set the tone for the rest of the weekend.

Because after that...

Everything just got better.

Saturday was finally float day.

Everyone was running around doing a hundred different things at once.

Making breakfast.

Packing snacks.

Loading coolers.

Blowing up what felt like a thousand river tubes.

Getting the paddleboard ready.

Making sure everyone had what they needed.

It was busy.

It was hot.

We were all running on almost no sleep.

And somehow...

Every single one of us was smiling.

The forecast called for about eighty five degrees with sunshine and hardly any clouds.

Absolutely perfect.

One funny problem though...

Not one person in our group brought a truck.

So we ended up strapping every giant inflatable tube onto the roofs of three different cars.

Looking back, we probably should've taken a picture of us driving down the road because we looked completely ridiculous.

Like some kind of inflatable parade rolling through town.

I couldn't stop laughing every time I looked in the mirror.

Then we finally got to the river.

The second my feet hit the water, Friday night didn't matter anymore.

We were exactly where we wanted to be.

Little did we know, the adventure was just getting started.

The second we pushed off from shore, everything that had happened over the last twenty four hours disappeared.

The lack of sleep.

The crazy neighbors.

The hunt for ice.

None of it mattered anymore.

We were finally on the Saco.

This is the moment the whole weekend is built around, and somehow it never disappoints.

All of our tubes were tied together into one giant floating raft. The coolers were strapped on, speakers were playing somewhere in the middle, and everyone floated from tube to tube talking, laughing, eating, or just enjoying the ride. Every once in a while someone would jump in to cool off, swim for a bit, then climb back into whichever tube happened to be closest. At any given moment someone was handing out drinks, passing around snacks, or laughing about something that happened five minutes earlier.

I had my paddleboard with me, like I do every year, tied to the outside of our little floating village. Sometimes I'd lay stretched out on it just enjoying the ride. Other times I'd jump into the river, float alongside everyone for a while, then climb back onto the paddleboard or into my tube. There was never really much of a plan. We just let the river take us wherever it wanted.

One of my favorite parts of every trip is bringing someone who's never been to the Saco before. You can tell people how beautiful it is, but until you're actually floating down the river, you just don't get it.

This year was extra special because my 19 year old daughter was finally with us. Believe it or not, even though we've been making this trip every summer for the last five years, she'd never been able to come. Some years she was with her dad, other years life just had different plans. It never worked out until this year.

Seeing her experience it for the first time honestly made me smile all day. My best friend and her 17 year old daughter were there for their first trip too. The girls have grown up together since they were little and are more like cousins than friends, so getting to watch them experience it together made it even more special.

Tall trees lined both sides of the river.

The water was crystal clear.

Groups floated by and everyone waved at each other like we'd known each other forever. That's one of my favorite things about the Saco. Complete strangers waving, smiling, and wishing each other a good day. For a few hours, it feels like everyone out there is part of the same little community.

Not work.

Not laundry.

Not the million things waiting for me at home.

Just the river, good friends, and one of those perfect summer days you wish would never end.

Looking back now, I honestly couldn't tell you how long we'd been floating.

Time just works differently out there.

Then everything changed.

I reached for my phone to take a picture.

Nothing.

I looked again.

Still nothing.

At first I wasn't too worried. I figured it had slid under a towel, gotten buried under one of the bags, or maybe someone was literally sitting on it.

So we all started digging through the tubes.

Nothing.

That's when my stomach dropped.

My phone was gone.

The phone itself wasn't what bothered me so much.

It had insurance.

I could replace a phone.

What I couldn't replace were all the pictures and videos we'd already taken that weekend.

And to make matters worse, this was the second vacation with my daughter where I'd somehow managed to lose my phone before everything had backed up to Google Cloud. Which is actually kind of unbelievable considering those are the only two times I've ever lost my phone.

I just remember thinking...

Not again.

The Side Quest

Thankfully, my phone was in one of those waterproof floating cases.

So technically there was still hope.

My daughter immediately pulled up Life360 to see if she could find it.

There it was.

Sort of.

The problem was my phone had been on battery saver mode. The service along the river goes in and out constantly, and I didn't want my battery dying, so the location hadn't updated in eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes.

That doesn't sound like very long.

On a moving river, it might as well have been forever.

We slowed everyone down and started asking people floating by if they'd seen a phone. At one point there was even a guy snorkeling along the edge of the river looking for lost treasures who offered to help. He went back toward where we thought I might have lost it and kept an eye out.

Nothing.

I kept telling everyone it was okay.

I had insurance.

I could replace it.

I didn't want eleven people sitting around on the river waiting for me or letting my lost phone ruin the day everyone had been looking forward to.

So eventually I accepted it.

My phone was gone.

At least that's what I told everyone.

Inside?

I was dying a little.

Not because of the phone.

Because of those pictures.

Eventually, I convinced everyone to stop looking and get floating again. There was nothing else we could do, and I wasn't going to let everyone spend the rest of the day searching for a phone I was pretty sure was long gone.

My daughter wasn't quite as ready to give up as I was.

She kept checking Life360 and eventually set an alert so that if my phone ever got a signal and updated its location, her phone would notify her.

Then we kept floating.

Music back on.

Drinks being passed around.

Everyone laughing.

And every once in a while...

She checked her phone.

About an hour and a half later, she suddenly looked at me.

"Mom. Your phone just pinged."

And this time...

It was updating in real time.

We all crowded around her phone looking at Life360.

The little dot was moving.

Actually moving.

And somehow, according to Life360...

My phone was on a boat.

LOL.

Now we had a whole new mystery.

Was my phone just happily floating down the Saco all by itself?

Had someone found it and tossed it into their tube?

Was it floating along with another group?

We had absolutely no idea.

The only thing we knew was that it was moving down the river right along with the rest of us.

There wasn't much we could do while it was still moving, so we kept watching.

Then...

It stopped.

But the location kept updating.

Real time.

Same spot.

That was it.

My daughter insisted we were going after it.

There was just one small problem.

It was at least a mile, maybe two, behind us.

Luckily, and I mean REALLY luckily, this happened along a section of the river with a huge sandy beach.

If that phone had stopped along one of the sections with nothing but woods, rocks, or a steep dirt bank between us and it, this story probably would have ended very differently.

But it didn't.

We had a beach.

So everyone pulled over. They told me to go look and that they'd have plenty of fun just hanging out for a while.

Four of us decided to give it a shot.

Me.

My daughter.

My best friend.

And her daughter.

And off we went.

At first, it actually felt exciting.

We had a location.

We had a giant beach.

We could see the dot.

How hard could this possibly be?

Yeah...

It was 87 degrees.

There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

And because the phone was behind us, we couldn't just let the river carry us back to it. We had to go upstream, which meant walking.

The sun was beating down on us, the sand was HOT, and walking through rough sand, as we all know, is a completely different workout than walking on normal ground.

At first I was fine.

But with every step through that hot sand, my legs started getting a little heavier.

My daughter kept checking the phone.

"Almost there."

So we kept walking.

And walking.

And walking.

At some point, my best friend decided she'd had enough.

She was done.

Completely done.

She took a quick dip in the river to cool off, then laid herself right down in the sand and took a nap.

Honestly, I couldn't even blame her.

The other three of us kept going.

My legs were burning.

I was hot.

I was sweaty.

I was getting a little grumpy.

And every time my daughter said, "We're almost there," I was becoming slightly less convinced she knew what "almost" meant.

But that little dot was still there.

Still updating.

Still not moving.

So we kept going.

Then finally...

A woman farther down the beach yelled to us.

"Are you looking for a phone?"

YES!

We walked over and found a family sitting along the beach. A boy who looked to be around twelve had found my phone floating down the river and given it to his mom.

I cannot explain the relief.

And while we had been trying to find my phone...

They had been trying to find me.

They'd tried getting into the phone enough to figure out who it belonged to. We'd called it a bunch of times, but somehow they kept missing our calls. Eventually they managed to connect with one of my friends back home and gave them a number for me to call so I could get the phone back after we got off the river.

They didn't have to do any of that.

They could have ignored it.

They could have left it floating.

They could have kept it.

Instead, complete strangers found somebody's phone floating down a river and spent their own time trying to get it back to the person who lost it.

People really can be amazing.

I had my phone.

I had my pictures.

Side quest complete.

Except...

Now we had to get back.

I turned around and looked at how far we'd walked.

Absolutely not.

My legs were DONE.

There was no way I was walking all the way back across that sand.

My daughter, however, had a solution.

"We'll swim."

Excuse me?

She was completely serious.

She pointed down the river toward where everyone was waiting and somehow convinced me that swimming almost two miles back to the group was going to be easier than walking it.

And honestly?

At that point...

She wasn't wrong.

So into the river we went.

No tubes.

No paddleboard.

Just us, the current, and almost two miles between us and everyone else.

And you know what?

It was actually amazing.

We stopped fighting the river and just let it carry us.

My legs finally got a break.

The water felt incredible after walking across that hot sand.

And my daughter was LOVING it.

At one point, while we were floating along, my 19 year old daughter yelled...

"I feel like Pocahontas!"

I lost it.

After everything we'd just done, walking across what felt like the Sahara looking for a phone, finding it with a random family, and now free floating down the Saco trying to catch our friends...

Apparently she was Pocahontas now.

Of course, we couldn't forget one very important thing along the way.

My best friend.

Still sleeping on the beach.

Apparently while we were gone, random people floating down the river and others hanging out on the beach kept stopping to ask if she was okay.

Every time, she told them the same thing.

"I'm fine. My friends are coming back for me."

The problem was...we had been gone for a WHILE.

So apparently nobody believed her.

Then finally, here we came floating back down the river.

She sat up and yelled...

"SEE! TOLD YA!"

We collected our abandoned side quest member and continued floating toward everyone else.

Eventually we could see our group again.

As we got closer, I lifted my phone over my head.

And everyone CHEERED.

Loud.

Like we'd just completed some huge mission.

Honestly, in that moment...

It kind of felt like we had.

After that, I swear everyone was a little happier.

For the next hour we kept talking about how absolutely crazy it was that we actually found my phone.

What were the chances?

It fell into a moving river.

Floated who knows how far.

A kid happened to find it.

His family tried to find me.

Life360 somehow got a signal at exactly the right time.

And of all the places along the Saco it could have stopped, it stopped along a huge stretch of beach where we could actually get to it.

We couldn't stop talking about it.

But eventually the excitement settled down and we went right back to what we'd been doing before my little side quest took over the afternoon.

Floating.

Swimming.

Singing along to the music.

Passing around drinks and snacks.

Waving to strangers as they floated by.

Just enjoying the river and each other.

Everyone was happy. The sun was still shining, the music was playing, and after everything that had just happened, I think we were all feeling pretty lucky.

And maybe it was because I'd spent the last couple of hours convinced I'd lost every picture I'd taken that weekend, but I know I appreciated the rest of that float just a little bit more.

We laughed.

We sang.

We floated.

And for the rest of the afternoon, nothing went wrong.

Which at this point felt like a pretty big accomplishment.

Eventually though, our campground came into view.

One of the best parts about staying here is that the river brings us right back to camp. After hours of floating, there's no shuttle to catch, no cars to pile back into, and no figuring out how to get eleven people and a mountain of floats back where they belong.

We just float right up to the beach at our campground and we're home.

Honestly, after a full day on the river, it doesn't get much more convenient than that.

None of us were quite ready for the float to be over, but seeing camp waiting for us wasn't a bad way to end it.

Getting off the river was a whole adventure of its own.

Two members of our group had apparently enjoyed the float a little more than the rest of us and didn't even make it off the beach.

And by nap, I mean they were OUT.

Thankfully, their boyfriends took over and helped get them off the beach and back to their tents, where they could continue their very well deserved naps.

The rest of us started the process of getting everything back to camp.

And there was A LOT of everything.

Tubes.

Coolers.

My paddleboard.

Bags.

Speakers.

All the random stuff we'd somehow managed to bring onto the river with us.

Luckily, our campsites were right against the beach, so we didn't have to haul all of it through the campground. We basically just had to get everything off the beach and back to our sites.

Once we finally got everything back, apparently the river decided it wasn't quite done taking people out.

We lost a third.

One of the guys climbed into a hammock.

That was it.

OUT.

Honestly, considering everything he'd already done that weekend, he'd earned it.

Eventually everyone showered, found something to eat, and slowly started feeling human again.

After everyone had eaten and recovered a little, the same friend who had escaped to a hotel the night before had an idea.

"Why don't we make a fire down on the beach?"

Honestly, after the day we'd just had, it sounded perfect.

So that's exactly what we did.

We grabbed what we needed and headed back down to the river.

Except this time there were no tubes to blow up.

No coolers to strap together.

No phones to lose.

Just us.

We made a fire right there on the beach beside the river, pulled up our chairs, made s'mores, had some drinks and talked about everything that had happened that day.

At some point, I looked up.

The stars were unbelievable.

I live in the woods, so I'm used to seeing stars at night.

But not like this.

There was so little light around us that you could actually see the Milky Way stretching across the sky.

The actual Milky Way.

It was one of those things that doesn't really photograph on your phone the way it looks in person.

You just have to sit there and look at it.

So we did.

We sat around that fire for a couple of hours, eating s'mores, having drinks, laughing, looking at the stars and winding down from what had turned into one hell of a day.

Eventually, one or two at a time, we started disappearing back toward our tents.

Nobody really announced they were going to bed.

One person would leave.

Then another.

Until eventually the fire got smaller and there were only a few of us left.

The air had cooled down, but thankfully it wasn't nearly as cold as the night before.

The campground had mostly settled.

It was quiet.

Actually quiet.

We crawled into our tents completely exhausted.

This time, for all the right reasons.

And we slept.

Sunday morning started much quieter than Saturday.

Probably because this time we'd all actually slept.

We slowly started crawling out of our tents, making breakfast and figuring out what we needed for the day.

Today's plan was Lower Falls.

When the weather allows it, I always try to plan our river float for Saturday and Lower Falls for Sunday.

There's actually a reason for that.

Lower Falls can get REALLY crowded on a summer weekend. By Sunday, a lot of the weekend tourists are packing up and heading home, so it's usually a little quieter. Monday is even better, but Sunday has always worked well for us.

We knew we'd be there for a good part of the day, so we packed up plenty of food, drinks and everything else we thought we'd need.

And this year we had a serious upgrade.

One of the guys had brought this amazing Black+Decker grill, griddle and burner setup with him.

This was the same guy we'd lost to the hammock after the river the day before.

Turns out, he came prepared.

Really prepared.

We packed up his grill along with all of our food, piled everyone into three cars and headed out.

Lower Falls is completely different from floating the Saco.

For starters...

The water is COLD.

Even on a hot summer day, that first step in will take your breath away.

But once you're in for a few minutes, it's incredibly refreshing.

Or you just go numb.

Either way, eventually it feels great.

It's also a much slower kind of day.

There are natural rock slides, waterfalls, deep pools for swimming and a huge rock that people jump from into the water below.

But there's also plenty of time to just...

Do nothing.

Which apparently our group was VERY good at.

Throughout the day, different people would find a shallow spot where the water was running over the rocks, lay themselves right down in it and fall asleep.

Not all together.

This wasn't some organized group nap.

One person would disappear for a while and you'd look over...

Sleeping in the river.

Later somebody else would do it.

Just stretched out on the rocks with the cold water running right around and over them like this was a completely normal place to take a nap.

Honestly, they looked pretty comfortable.

One thing I realized I should have told everyone to bring was a book.

The Saco float is music, drinks, swimming, talking and constantly moving.

Lower Falls is different.

It's one of those places where you can swim for a while, eat something, find a warm rock in the sun, read a book, take a nap apparently, then get back in the water whenever you feel like it.

Of course, we couldn't just relax all day.

The water was moving faster than I'd ever seen it at Lower Falls before.

There were spots where you could actually see little patches of whitewater, and the current around the natural rock slides was noticeably stronger than usual.

A few of the guys went down one of the slides and managed to grab onto the rocks before reaching the larger fall below.

And just to be clear...

That's the fall you DON'T want to go down.

They made it look pretty easy.

So naturally, my friend and I looked at each other and thought...

We can do that.

We could not do that.

We went down the slide and completely missed the rock we were supposed to grab.

Instead, we ended up stuck on a rock right before the bigger fall with the current rushing past us on both sides.

Not ideal.

My friend was having her own problems getting herself back toward the safer side, but I had another problem.

My legs.

Normally, I honestly think I would have been fine.

Unfortunately, the day before I'd apparently decided to walk across half of Maine looking for my phone.

My legs were still paying for it.

Every time I tried to plant my feet and lock my legs against the current, they would start wobbling and just give out underneath me.

I'd get myself steady.

Try to move.

Wobble.

Nope.

At that point, I realized I wasn't getting myself out of there without some help.

Thankfully, our group wasn't the only one paying attention.

A few of the guys, along with some complete strangers who were nearby, started working their way across the top of the larger fall.

They basically made a human bridge.

One person at a time, my friend and I grabbed onto them and worked our way across until we were safely back on the right side.

Needless to say...

We did NOT try that slide again.

The girls had been down below jumping off the big rock when all of this happened, so they missed our little debacle.

Apparently hearing about it afterward wasn't enough to convince them not to try it.

A while later, my daughter and my best friend's daughter decided they wanted to go down the slide too.

I told them exactly what had happened to us.

They still wanted to do it.

So this time, we were a little smarter about it.

A few of the guys went down into the water below the slide and positioned themselves before the bigger fall. That way, if either of the girls missed the rock they needed to grab on the right side, someone would already be there to catch them.

My best friend's daughter went first.

The slide shot her perfectly over to the right.

Exactly where she needed to be.

Easy.

Then my daughter went.

And apparently she takes after her mother.

The current shot her straight to the left.

Same exact thing that had happened to us.

Except this time we were ready for it.

The guys were already waiting below, and as she went past, she was able to grab onto them and get herself safely over to the right side.

Maybe the problem wasn't us after all.

Maybe that slide just had favorites.

After that little adventure, I was perfectly happy staying toward the top.

We found spots on the rocks where we could stretch out with our bodies in the running water and just relax.

Some people swam.

Some ate.

Some talked.

Some continued our group's new tradition of falling asleep wherever they happened to be.

And the girls spent part of the afternoon jumping off the BIG rock into the deep pool below.

We cooked food on our new favorite grill, hung out in the sun and spent another few hours doing absolutely nothing we needed to be doing.

Which was kind of the whole point.

Eventually, though, it was time to pack everything back up.

Food.

Towels.

Coolers.

The grill.

All the stuff we'd somehow spread across the rocks throughout the day.

We loaded everything back into the cars and headed toward camp.

Tired.

A little sun soaked.

Thankfully still in one piece.

And very ready for our last night together.

When we got back to camp, apparently some people still had energy.

I was not one of those people.

The girls decided they wanted to go for a hike, and one of my oldest friends, who I've known since sixth grade and who LOVES hiking, was more than happy to take them.

Another friend decided to go along too, so he and she headed off with the girls while the rest of us stayed behind at camp.

While they were off exploring, we started getting ready for one of my favorite traditions of the entire trip.

The last night feast.

The last night is always bittersweet.

We look forward to it every year because the last night feast has become one of my favorite parts of the trip.

Everyone pulls out whatever food they have left. We build a fire. We cook. We eat. We laugh. And somehow dinner turns into an hours long event.

But there's also this little feeling sitting in the back of your mind the whole time.

It's the last night.

Tomorrow morning the tents come down.

The cars get packed.

And one by one, everyone starts heading home.

So as much as I look forward to the last night feast...

I never really want it to start.

Because once it does, I know the weekend is almost over.

But we weren't packing yet.

And we had A LOT of food to cook.

Everyone started pulling things out of coolers and bringing them over to the fire.

"What about these?"

"We need to cook this too."

"Who's eating these?"

Pretty quickly it stopped mattering who brought what.

If it needed to be cooked before morning, it was going on that fire.

We didn't use a single grill.

What we did have was a metal grate someone had brought that fit right over the fire pit, a cast iron pan, a soup pan and a whole lot of food.

So we got to work.

The potatoes were wrapped in foil and thrown directly into the hot coals.

We started with bacon in the cast iron pan because, obviously, we weren't about to waste perfectly good bacon grease.

Once the bacon was done, that grease became cooking gold for everything that came after it.

Peppers.

Onions.

Mushrooms.

Sausage.

Asparagus.

Shrimp and seafood.

Hamburgers.

Hot dogs.

Beans.

And whatever else kept appearing from everyone's coolers.

At some point the hikers made their way back to camp and joined right into whatever round of dinner we happened to be on.

There was no possible way to cook everything at once.

Which honestly made it better.

Dinner happened in stages.

Something would finish cooking and come off the fire.

Everyone would grab some.

Then something else went on.

While that cooked, we sat around in our camping chairs, listened to music, talked and laughed.

Then another batch was ready.

More food came off.

More food went on.

The potatoes stayed buried down in the coals getting soft while everything else cooked above them.

Someone would remember something else sitting in a cooler that needed to be eaten.

Onto the fire it went.

There really wasn't a beginning or an end to the meal.

Nobody sat down with one plate and said, "Okay, this is dinner."

We just cooked.

And ate.

And cooked some more.

For hours.

It felt less like eleven people camping together and more like one giant family dinner around a fire.

Nobody cared whose food was whose anymore.

Nobody was in a hurry.

If something was ready, you ate it.

If it wasn't, you waited for the next round.

And somehow everything tastes better when it's cooked over a fire.

Especially when you've spent the entire weekend swimming, floating, walking miles through hot sand, getting stuck near waterfalls and apparently sleeping in random bodies of water.

By the time the last rounds of food came off the fire, we were STUFFED.

Completely stuffed.

The kind of full where you start wondering why you ate that last piece of whatever somebody handed you.

But nobody really wanted to get up either.

So we stayed around the fire.

Music playing.

Talking.

Laughing.

Replaying stories from the weekend that had literally happened a day ago like they were already old memories.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, you remember...

This is why I do this every year.

Not just for the river.

Not just for Lower Falls.

Not even for the ridiculous stories we somehow manage to come home with.

It's this.

Sitting around a fire with people you love.

Eating way too much food.

Laughing about absolutely nothing.

Knowing nobody has anywhere else they need to be.

For just one more night.

Eventually we were so full and so tired that one by one, everyone started making their way back to their tents.

Our last full day together was over.

And just like that...

Tomorrow was Monday.

Monday morning we woke up after another REALLY good night's sleep.

By Sunday night, most of the weekend campers had already headed home, and when we woke up Monday there were only a handful of occupied sites left around us.

The campground was so quiet.

And when I say campground, don't picture paved sites with electricity, water hookups and lights everywhere.

There is none of that here.

We're camping in the woods of Maine, right on the Saco River, just over the New Hampshire border.

We actually get into the river in New Hampshire and spend the day floating until we cross into Maine and literally float right back to our campground and our campsites.

Which also means...

We are very much in bear country.

So you can imagine my reaction when one of my oldest friends, who is also an avid camper and hiker, walked over that morning and informed me that someone had left a PLATE OF SHRIMP sitting way too close to my tent overnight.

Shrimp.

Outside.

Next to my tent.

All night.

I had apparently been sleeping peacefully while someone had basically left a dinner invitation for every bear in Maine beside my tent.

How nothing sniffed out the shrimp, and then me, I will never know.

But apparently even the bears had decided to go home after the weekend.

Once we confirmed I had somehow survived the great shrimp incident of 2026, it was time to start doing the thing none of us really wanted to do.

Pack.

Monday morning is always a little strange.

Everyone wakes up at different times.

Someone is making breakfast.

Someone else already has half their tent packed.

Coolers are being emptied.

Sleeping bags are getting rolled up.

Cars that somehow held everything on the way there suddenly look WAY too small to hold all the same stuff on the way home.

And slowly, the campground we'd spent the weekend turning into our little home starts disappearing.

Everyone had different reasons they needed to get back and different times they needed to leave, so we weren't all pulling out together.

One by one, people finished packing.

One by one, cars got loaded.

One by one, we started saying goodbye.

I didn't have anywhere I needed to be at a certain time.

And honestly...

I wasn't ready to go home yet.

I still wanted a little more water.

A little more New Hampshire.

And there was one more thing I really wanted to do before heading home.

My daughter had never been down the Kancamagus Highway.

There was absolutely no way I was this close and not taking her.

My best friend's daughter decided she wanted to stay too.

So I started sending some of my already packed stuff home in other people's cars to lighten the load, and while the rest of our group slowly started heading home, a few of us decided we weren't quite done yet.

By the time everyone else had left, there were six of us.

Four adults.

And the two girls.

I keep calling them girls even though my daughter was 19 and about to turn 20.

They're still the girls.

And just like that, our group of eleven had become six.

The camping part of the trip was over.

But apparently...

We still weren't ready to go home.

With the campground behind us, the six of us headed out.

But we still weren't heading home.

First stop was Zeb's.

If you've ever been to North Conway, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about.

It's this huge old fashioned general store filled with candy, gifts, souvenirs and pretty much anything else you can think of. It's one of those places you can easily spend way more time in than you planned.

So of course we did.

We wandered around, bought some things we definitely didn't need, stocked up on candy and eventually decided we should probably keep moving.

But we still weren't ready to start the drive home.

Somehow we ended up finding this little beach along another river in the area.

It wasn't the Saco, just one of those little spots we happened to come across while driving.

And that became our next stop.

There wasn't really anything there.

Which was kind of perfect.

No big plans.

No tubes.

No waterfalls to almost get ourselves stuck on.

Just a little beach, the river and six people who apparently weren't ready for the weekend to end.

We pulled out some cards.

Skipped rocks.

Sat by the water.

Talked.

And somehow managed to turn what was supposed to be a quick stop into most of the afternoon.

Eventually, around 2:30, we had to admit something.

We should probably start heading home.

Probably.

One in our group decided she'd stretched the weekend far enough and headed home from there.

And then there were five.

Three adults.

The two girls.

And somehow...

Three cars.

There was just one problem.

My daughter had never driven the Kancamagus Highway.

And if I was going to finally take her...

We weren't rushing through it.

So instead of taking the quickest way home, we took the scenic route.

We had three cars between the five of us, and we made our way down the Kancamagus stopping at almost every lookout along the way.

And I mean almost EVERY one.

Drive for a while.

Pull over.

Everyone gets out.

Take pictures.

Look around.

Get back in the cars.

Drive some more.

See another lookout.

Pull over again.

At some point we stopped at one of the overlooks and had lunch with the mountains stretched out in front of us.

There are definitely worse places to eat lunch.

Looking back at this trip, there's something else that makes it a little different from all the years before.

This group had never done this together.

Out of the eleven of us, only one person had come on my Saco trip the year before.

Some had been to the Saco before.

Some were experiencing it for the first time.

But the people I'd normally done this trip with over the years couldn't make it this year, and almost everyone who showed up was new to this particular little tradition of mine.

Some people knew each other.

Some barely knew each other.

And some had never met at all.

Which could have gone either way.

But somehow...

It just worked.

By Sunday night, sitting around that fire passing food around, listening to music and laughing, it didn't feel like a bunch of different people I'd pulled together for a camping trip.

It felt like our group.

And speaking of people nobody really knew...

We need to talk about the winner of the completely made up...

Saco 2026 Best Camper Award.

Yes.

We made up an award.

And there wasn't even a competition until we decided there was one.

But there was absolutely no question who won.

He was a last minute addition to the trip and the younger brother of one of my oldest friend.

I've known his brother since sixth grade, but he's quite a bit younger than us. He was still a little kid when we were graduating high school, so most of us had never actually met him before this trip.

He showed up...

And apparently had been preparing his entire life for this moment.

He helped tie ALL those ridiculous floats onto the cars.

He brought the Black+Decker grill setup that came with us to Lower Falls.

He cooked.

He helped.

When one of our friends got his keys wet on the river and couldn't get his car alarm to stop going off, guess who figured that out too?

Yep.

Our Best Camper.

Any time something needed to be done, somehow he was there doing it.

And he was just fun to have around.

Although apparently even Best Camper has his limits, because we did eventually find him completely passed out in that hammock after the river.

So congratulations to the very first winner of an award that didn't exist until this trip.

Saco 2026 Saco Hero.

You earned it.

There was one more part of this trip I didn't find out about until after we were home.

The phone.

Because apparently that story still wasn't finished.

After we got home, I reached out to the woman who had my phone.

I wanted to thank her again and get her address so I could send her something for going through all that trouble to get it back to me.

That's when she told me something I didn't know.

The year before, someone in her group had lost their phone on the Saco.

Same kind of thing.

Someone else found it and went through the trouble of tracking them down and getting it back to them.

A year later, her family found mine.

I don't know.

Maybe that's just a little bit of Saco River magic.

Someone did it for them.

They did it for me.

And I know without a doubt that if I find someone's phone floating down that river someday, I'm doing the exact same thing.

You just keep it going.

I've been doing this trip for years.

And every year there are stories.

Things go wrong.

Things go right.

Someone inevitably does something we'll still be talking about the next summer.

But this year was different.

We started the weekend with crazy neighbors, police at the campground and about three hours of sleep.

I lost my phone in a moving river and somehow got it back.

We walked what felt like halfway across New Hampshire in 87 degree heat looking for it.

We floated almost two miles back because my legs had officially quit.

We got ourselves stuck above a waterfall.

People slept on beaches.

People slept in hammocks.

People slept IN the river.

Someone left shrimp next to my tent in bear country.

We ate until we couldn't move.

We laughed.

A LOT.

And somehow, through all of that...

This was by far the best Saco trip yet.

Not because everything went perfectly.

Clearly, it did not.

It was the people.

Watching my daughter finally experience something I've loved for years.

Watching her and my best friend's daughter experience it together.

Watching people who had never done this trip with me before completely get why I keep coming back.

Sitting around a fire with a group that hadn't started the weekend as a group and realizing somewhere along the way...

We had become one.

That's the stuff I'll remember.

The river will still be there next year.

Lower Falls will still be freezing.

I'll probably still bring way too much stuff.

And apparently from now on I need to check the ground around my tent for seafood before going to bed.

But this exact trip?

With these exact people?

We'll never get this exact weekend again.

And maybe that's what made it so good.

Saco 2026.

Definitely one for the books.

And without a doubt...

The best one yet.

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