L.L. Bean Northern Lights and The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens 2023

We recently drove to Southern Maine to celebrate Christmas with Jamie’s family. On the way back up north we spent the day in Freeport checking out LL Bean’s Northern Lights celebration and the night at The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens Aglow.

L.L. Bean Northern Lights

Every year we attend L.L. Bean’s Northern Lights celebration. It looks a little different from year to year but they usually have the staples; like their giant snow globe, model train and on the weekends you can meet Santa.

Truckcuterie

After a full morning exploring L.L. Bean and the special things they had set up for the holidays we headed back to Jamie’s truck for some lunch. When we go on trips we’ve started to have “parking lot picnics”. None of us are really interested in taking up the time, energy or money required to go to a sit down restaurant for lunch and in an attempt to keep it a little healthier then a drive through we just pack a cooler with some food. This trip I packed things like cheese, cracker, hummus, pretzels, pepperoni, grapes and clementines. Kid friendly charcuterie type stuff. When I told the kids we were having charcuterie for lunch back at the truck, Jake said, so we are having “truckcuterie” which absolutely cracked us up. So now we not only have “parking lot picnics” we also have “truckcuterie”

Boothbay Harbor

With bellies full of truckcuterie we headed to Boothbay to prepare for the Gardens Aglow.

We had some extra time before our 4 PM reservation at the gardens so we headed down to Boothbay Harbor to wander around. We didn’t see this place lit up at night, but I bet its adorable. We stopped by a candy shop where the kids spent some of their Christmas money on a piece of fudge and we walked across the footbridge.

Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens Aglow

Then we were onto the Gardens Aglow. The botanical garden has 750,000 LED lights covering over 14 acres gardens. We arrived at 3:30 PM for a 4 PM reservation time and I’m glad we did. The cars were already rolling in. After getting on all our cold weather gear we stopped by the bathroom and then it was just about time to head into the gardens. They had concessions stands and Jamie bought each kid a hot chocolate, which they happily sipped.

When buying tickets they had 4, 5:30, 6:30 or 7:30 arrival times. I went with the 4 PM and I was pretty darn happy that I went with this one for a few reasons. It was neat to see the transition of the lights from light to dark. We were done before it was too cold and late and as we were leaving the line of cars coming into the parking lot was crazy! This event gets super busy. It was absolutely stunning though.

We headed back to Freeport after Garden Aglow where we stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn for the night. They are about 45 minutes away from each other. We got takeout from Brickyard Hollow for dinner.