About Us – Kathi, Sarah & Jenn

The Heart, Brains & Soul Behind This Site

Here's where you can discover the real & unvarnished truth about us... the real live people who are behind the Discover Acadia website...

Hi, we are the mother-daughters team behind this site! That's us in the picture to the left—Kathi (Mom), Jenn (in the middle, the "baby"), and Sarah on the right (the oldest child).

And this website is a labor of love... or passion you might say... for the 3 of us. Actually, Acadia is a place we kind of stumbled upon one year, the first camping vacation we took as a single mom, little girl family, way back in 1992.

I had always loved to camp and hike, and when married, had camped a great deal. But after a couple of disastrous rain-soaked camping vacations in the waning days of my marriage, I'd pretty much decided that I was "too old" for camping (at 30-something!).

Then, a couple of years later, as a newly single mom, I needed a budget-friendly vacation idea for me and my girls (who were 10 & 8 at the time). So, I took a second look at camping, provided I could make camping in the rain reasonably tolerable. A new family-sized, easy to pitch tent from Herman's Sporting Goods did it and the planning for our July vacation began!

I'd always wanted to see Acadia National Park, though I didn't know much about it. But it was at least a 12-hour ride from where I lived in southern NJ, so we decided to break the trip into a few days and make some stops (at Mystic, Connecticut and Marblehead, Massachusetts) along the way.

Once we got to Acadia, though, we were sorry that we tarried, because... we fell in love with the park! We only had 5 days there, and it wasn't enough. So, we went back every second year... six times in all, until we'd discovered Acadia in all her nooks and crannies. And we plan to keep going back, again and again...

Kathi's Story

I was a single mom for more than a decade, during my girls' most formative growing up years. It wasn't what I would have chosen for us when I became a mom, but it turned out OK. I think my girls and I developed a closeness, a bond, that we would never have had if I had stayed married. For a long time, it felt like it was "Us girls against the world!"

Well, my girls are grown and on their own now, and I am married to a great guy, but our mother-daughter bond is one that will never be broken. It is forged of many, many wonderful shared memories, and central to those memories are our many trips to Acadia National Park.

Not only are my girls grown, but they are now living in Austin, Texas, while I live in beautiful Boise, Idaho. Thanks to modern technology, we are able to still keep in close touch through IM, cellphones and email, but I still miss them immensely every day.

I've had a few careers in my life, starting out with two decades of nursing experience, and then dabbling in technical writing and support, before using my love for writing and technology to create informational websites like this one.

A few years ago, I suddenly got the brainstorm to build a website about Acadia with my daughters! It would accomplish several things...

• Give us a joint project to bond over
• Share our passion for Acadia with others
• Relive our many happy memories of fun at Acadia
• Enable me to teach my daughters how to build a successful website, using SiteBuildIt

So, I pitched the idea to them and they embraced it enthusiastically. We immediately launched into planning, and so here we are! I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about me... you can see, I am a real person, with a real passion for Acadia NP!

You'll find that this site may have 3 slightly different "voices", as we have each contributed to different sections, though there has been collaboration throughout.

• Sarah is our researcher and fact checker, especially when it comes to hiking and biking trails. After all, she's our whiz, when it comes to trails and finding our way
  around. :-)

• Jenn is our organizer, project manager, and main creative force. She has also helped write a lot of the content.

• And I am the overall webmaster and "boss". I've done most of the writing and all of the site designing, as well as most of the site promotion and socializing stuff. I also do anything else that needs doing. After all, isn't that what moms do?

Hope you enjoy our approach to discovering Acadia...

Sarah's Story

Sarah is the "older" daughter and our steadying influence. She's the one Jenn & I could always count on to get us around – and back home – whenever we vacationed at Acadia (and anywhere else!).

Yes, this is Kathi, and I'm writing Sarah's portion for her... you see, she generally prefers to work behind the scenes.

But... don't be fooled... a lot of what you see here will come from Sarah. As I said above, she's an expert researcher, plus we can count on her to remember every detail about every trail and every location we visited in Acadia. Just like she has always provided direction on our hikes, she will also be our guiding compass in the development of this site.

But, we will try to bring Sarah to life on these pages too. She's a bright, talented young woman who is also a world traveler with a gift for languages. One of her most recent adventures was a stint teaching English to students in Athens, Greece.

Sarah is currently in studies to become a registered nurse (like me!), but her influence will continue to be felt here.

Jenn's Story

Hi! I'm Jenn. I'm the baby in the family. Of course I'm not really a baby anymore. I live in Austin, Texas now with my husband, and a baby son on the way in July 2011. I've been down here for a couple of years now, moving only two weeks after graduation from Syracuse University.

I got my Bachelor's degree from Syracuse for Entrepreneurship, but then I went on to more schooling for my Patisserie and Baking certificate from the Texas Culinary Academy. I've been working in the bakery at the original (and largest) Whole Foods market ever since.

One day I want to own my own bakery, catering service or bed & breakfast. Who knows... maybe I'll even move to Bar Harbor and open up shop there.

Acadia has always been a special place for my mom, Sar and me. It's hard now knowing that we won't be able to go there as often as we used to. As I work on this website, I get more and more anxious to return.

Look for us soon at Acadia National Park in the summer of 2012, when we hope to return. We'll be the three women hiking around in Discover-Acadia.com t-shirts handing out stickers and flyers!

Photo courtesy of dbking/Flickr

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