Vacationland

Imagine you’re sitting in an airport waiting for your flight back to Orlando. To your left, a little girl slathered in body glitter twirls endlessly, her well-worn Elsa dress billowing out around her. You can’t actually hear her singing, but you still hear the song. To your right, two brothers extend and retract their off-brand lightsabers at each other (mom said they can’t fight for real). A toddler across the way watches them, clutching her Grogu plushie against her Grogu shirt, enraptured.

These are the only four children in the terminal who aren’t crying.

You know what kind of flight you’re in for, but you board anyway. At least the lady in the seat behind you is an adult this time. “You headed to Disney?” she asks, though it feels more like a statement.

“Nope,” you reply. “I’m going home.”

She just stares for a moment. It probably never occurred to her that people could be from Orlando.

Nevertheless, we exist: Central Florida locals, casually taking the most beautiful suburbs of the most visited city in America and calling them home. Our vacation ends where everyone else’s begins.

And most of those vacations are beginning right about now. The snowbirds are already holding up the damn traff—I mean, settling in for the winter—and countless families are booking their holiday flights as we speak. For them, this is Florida at its best.

For me, though, it’s kind of at its worst. I love the aesthetic of fall; the air gets cool but the plants are burning with fiery reds and yellows, their last hurrah before succumbing to winter.

Florida doesn’t get any of that. We get, what, hay? Various gourds? I can’t work with that. If I wanted the true autumn experience, I knew I’d have to go where autumn is its most autumnal: Maine.

So, my husband and I planned our honeymoon around it. This past October, as all the northerners prepared for their migration to Florida, two Florida natives traveled as far north as they could get, rented a camper van, and spent the next two weeks chasing the leaves as they turned.

It felt like seeing the sky for the first time. Sure, the crisp breeze and sunny skies felt familiar. Yes, we have pristine tree-lined country roads at home. But those colors… they change the flavor of the air.

We saw exactly what we wanted to see. Perfect fall foliage at peak season. Shale cliffsides overlooking an infinite wilderness, not a manmade structure in sight. All the weird quirks and novelties of northern life — elevation, rocky beaches, porcupines, Canada. It was thrilling, like visiting a foreign country.

At the same time, it had its drawbacks. Rain lasts all day. Businesses are open for eight minutes every other Tuesday. Having to think of moose as a threat elicits visceral fear. Worst of all, there’s no humidity—we swamp people owe our lives to a single tube of Blistex.

Maine was everything I hoped for, but by the end of the trip, I still found myself eager to board the return flight we shared with a hundred babies who collectively had an ear infection. Be it ever so humid, there’s no place like home.