City: Coastal Maine, ME

Category: Parks & Recreation

Telephone: (207) 726-4412

Description: That people cram themselves into camping areas at Acadia and Sebago Lake is hard to understand when you visit this spacious Down East gem. Word is getting out about the myriad delights of Cobscook Bay State Park, especially among kayakers, but it is still far less traveled than parks in the Midcoast and in York and Cumberland Counties. You can still get a reservation on a whim for the 106 sites here, even in the summer, which is unheard of in points south, and for a good site, no less. Just about all the sites at Cobscook are good. The park sprawls for 888 acres across a peninsula on the shore of the bay, and the camping area is ringed by the brine. Many sites are a skip from the water—so close, in fact, that campers arriving late at night have awoken to find salt water lapping at their tents. (The tides swing 24 feet here.) There’s plenty of space at each site, and a nice buffer of spruce forest between them—Cobscook’s famous for its privacy. Tenters have their pick in one area, RVs in another, and walk-in sites allow for real quietude. Kayakers like to push off right from their bivouacs, but there are proper boat launching sites. Swimming is not allowed, thanks to the undertows caused by the huge tidal rotation. Hot showers, a wealth of birdlife in the park and next door at Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge (200 species have been spotted in these parts), meadows of wildflowers, digging for clams, and a great launching pad for explorations of Eastport, Lubec, Machias, the rest of Washington County, and Canada, too—what more could anyone want in a park? Open from mid-May through mid-October.