I had a great second childhood. This is the short-version to the question about what it’s like to be a mom. It’s not perfect. It’s not easy. But when looking back now that the kids are young adults, it was a whole lot of fun.

My two daughters and I went on a ton of outdoor adventures and I wrote about many of them in a monthly column, Kidtracks, in the Maine Sunday Telegram and a blog on MaineToday.com from 2004 to 2016.

Now it’s 2019. One of my daughters graduated with her bachelors degree in May and the other is starting her senior year in college. And even though our outdoor adventuring is less frequent these days, we still manage to get out and have some fun when we can.

The websites that published my writing have been redesigned, updated or moved to new hosting services over the years. In the case of my online-only content I was often told during a redesign, “It’s too much work to move your old posts so save what you want before it’s deleted.”

So here I am with an archive of the writing I was able to save from the black hole. I often reference it while offering advice to friends these days on fun places to hike, kayak, cross-country ski, etc. (the good and the bad). It’s been a fun walk down memory lane as I reformat what I can (it’s a work-in-progress so apologies for the formatting weirdness I still need to sift through).

I also hope to add new adventures with my network of outdoor adventuring friends as my daughters navigate their own lives and schedules that rarely mesh with my own (not to mention the geography challenges with my youngest not living in Maine these days).

This blog is a collection of where I’ve been, the joy it’s been in raising kids in the Maine outdoors and the occasional calamities that I have come to realize will always be part of our family storytelling.

So here goes the next chapter of outdoor adventuring. And if the past year is any indication of all the great people I’ve met on my sans-kid adventures, it’s going to be a great one.