Vacationland. "The Way Life Should Be." A sign on I-95 says, "If you lived in Maine, you'd be home by now."

My aunt took offense to "The Way Life Should Be" one summer, saying that just because she and her family and many other residents of the state enjoyed that way of life, it's not for everybody. "Don't tell someone else how they should live," was the way she put it. Or thereabouts. It was years ago, and I only have a vague recollection because I could agree with both sides of the sentiment -- for at least a week every August, Maine is the way life should be. And in other ways -- say how a woman should deal with her own body -- I completely agree that you shouldn't tell someone else how to live.

When I return to Maine, it is like coming home again. I spent anywhere from a week to 10 days every August there on our family vacations from my earliest elementary school years though my last college summer. Some years, there would be an Easter trip up there, and once in college, Bryan and I spent the weekdays after Memorial Day 1997 driving across the Pine Tree State's numbered, sun-drenched, two-lane roads to towns like Camden, Wiscasset and the capital, Augusta, where we took my cousin Kate, then 12, to see Jurassic Park: The Lost World and she jumped out of her seat when one of the revived monsters suddenly appeared on the screen.

I suppose my familiarity with Maine can become a drawback, particularly when bringing Casey or someone new to the environs along for the first time. I can easily settle into the slower, more leisurely life there. When the weather allows, relaxing on a chair reading a book in the sunshine is enough to pass an hour or two. Late dinners, around 7, when everyone's home from work or sightseeing (the same spots we've been to dozens of times before), that drag on into dessert leave us at the table until 9. Within an hour, everyone's often in bed.

At least that's the way it used to go before I went to college and Kate and her sister Chris grew up. Now Kate can drive and goes to friends' houses at 9 and returns at 2 a.m. Bryan and I, fresh from our junior year of college, couldn't quite get ourselves to bed at 10 every night, so we'd play Scrabble or other classic board games until 11 or midnight. But at least once a trip, the day's adventures and our full stomachs pull on our eyelids by 10:30 or so, and rather than fighting the urge out of mere tradition, we're happy to brush our teeth, crawl into the twin beds in the downstairs guest room, and read for half an hour before turning out the lights to reveal the glowing stars stuck to the ceiling.

After we made it through the first night when I puked twice because Uncle Johnny decided to alter -- for the first time in my presence -- his pesto recipe, substituting walnuts for the pine nuts, the trip carried on as many of the previous ones have. While the Benadryl made its way through my system, we watched The Italian Job -- or Barb and Casey watched while I succumbed to dizziness and just wanted to sleep at a point just before the climactic heist at the end of the movie. By late morning I was back to O.K. and Casey and I headed to Freeport for some retail exercise. It was our credit cards' hardest working day of the trip.

Lunch at Gritty McDuff's produced a 12-pack of 22-ounce Vacationland Summer Ale for only $29 and three new logo-adorned pint glasses. Main St. in Freeport turned out to be strangely deserted for the first week of the summer vacation season, and with an iffy weather forecast, we determined that the tourists had not yet arrived. After snagging some deals at the L.L. Bean Factory Store, I purchased new hiking boots at the flagship and we snapped up some bargains at the J. Crew and Banana Republic outlets. Dinner that night was uneventful -- leftover barbecued items like burgers and chicken and ribs -- but Kate, Casey and I made the decision to go to Round Top for ice cream 10 minutes too late. We arrived 10 minutes after 9 p.m. -- closing time. We had a nice drive in the new(er) CRV, though.

The next morning, though leaving later than I'd roughly targeted, we reached Camden Hills State Park by noon. Despite some steep terrain on the trail and some mild grumbling by Casey (admittedly, it was my fault -- I'd been too ambitious in my selection of our first Maine hike), we reached the peak of Mt. Megunticook by 1 and had the broad vistas of the Atlantic Ocean and Camden all to ourselves. By 2, our legs nearly jelly, we were back in the car in our sneakers.

Lunch at Fitzpatrick's Cafe could not have tasted any better.

After a quick visit with Liz and Andy in their quaint house two blocks from the village center, we were back on the road, heading south on the popular coastal Route 1 on another culinary mission: after trying some my uncle offered, Casey desired a tub of spicy pickles from Morse's Sauerkraut for herself. The rain began, off and on, in the 90 minutes from the end of lunch to our stop at Morse's in Waldoboro. From there, we wound down Route 32 to Pemaquid Point, walking on the deserted rocks on a cool weekday late afternoon. I've never seen so few cars in the parking lot: three, including ours.

But before long, the rain returned, so we got back on the road to Wiscasset, where Kate was working in a gourmet food store and Barb and John were to meet us for dinner at the popular and all-purpose Sarah's, a place for pizza, pasta, seafood, soup or Mexican. Casey and I arrived early on purpose, visiting Kate's store briefly before getting to Sarah's early on purpose to unwind in the bar. When Barb and John arrived, they put their name in and joined us. When the bartender -- alone in that section of the restaurant except for us -- invited us to sit at one of the tables in her section, we decided against the wait (and the notoriously slow service) in the main dining room and got the bar's only riverside window seat. It paid off, too: The service was fast and all her attention, when not on filling drink orders from the main dining room staff or on the Unsolved Mysteries re-enactments on her TV, was on us. It was a decision that will have lasting effects, since Barb decided that from now on they'll eat in the bar.

With the five of us having three cars parked in Wiscasset, Barb decided she'd take one home while Johnny and Kate came in mine so the four of us could go to Round Top -- with plenty of time and daylight, this time, to spare. (The next morning, Barb drove Kate to work.) We ate our cones on the back porch, looking out over the fields where once grazed the cows from which the milk for the ice cream came. The setting sun splashed the long slivers of clouds with a deep red-orange hue contrasted against a deepening blue. On the ride home, Johnny detoured to the Damariscotta Lake Fish Ladder, where the streams below were packed nose-to-fin with hundreds of alewives suspended in an aquatic gridlock as they tried to make their way up to the lake. The pool at the bottom of the dam, near the landing where we parked, smelled of rotting fish and the water was dotted with the silver underbellies of decaying alewives. But looking from the walkway down into the rushing stream, you had to stare for a few moments to discern in the deepening dusk the black outlines of the wiggling fish against the dark shallows of the water.

When Kate asked for an explanation of their purpose, Johnny explained that they needed to get upstream to the lake to spawn. "So it's Mate or Die," Kate concluded. "Exactly," her father replied. Were the alewife not in decline and it illegal to do so, we likely could have stuck our hands into the water and plucked a fish out, as if we were bears. Not that we saw him, but Frankie wouldn't have liked that.

On Friday morning, when we left Maine, we didn't have to be up at a certain time. We didn't have to be packed and in the car by 9:30 or 10. There was no 8-to-9-hour drive to New Jersey ahead of us, like there has been on so many of my previous Maine trips. Thankfully, because our vacation continued, we were only going 3-to-4 hours south, back to Boston.

So we laced up the hiking boots for the second time and strolled down to the Sheepscot River through the woods on Johnny's property. I usually begin every Maine trip with an early walk to the river, stretching my legs in the early evening after the long drive up. But our arrival came under cloudy and rainy skies, so this time the first and only walk to the river was the one just before departure.

We planned our parting for 11:30, intending to visit the popular Red's Eats in Wiscasset so Casey could sample "The Best Lobster Roll in Maine." Packed and unencumbered by any breakfast, we were ready shortly after 11 and had our orders placed by 11:30, just beating the line that formed by the time we cleared our table for a couple standing with their tray looking out at the small seating area with nary a vacancy.

It seems fitting, after 20+ years of Maine summer trips, that this one, too, ended -- as was planned -- with food.