The places that don't make you apologize for the kids. Restaurants with crayons that aren't an afterthought, parks with shade and bathrooms, the ice-cream stop with the line on a hot Tuesday.
Nine miles north of Greenville on the east shore, 925 acres with the only real sand swimming beach convenient to town, two boat ramps, and a two-mile shoreline walking trail through spruce and birch. Ninety campsites split between two loops fill fast on July weekends — book ahead rather than showing up. The cross-country ski trails pick up the same footprint once the campground closes for the season.
The steamboat Katahdin, built in 1914 and the last wooden-hulled passenger vessel of its kind left in Maine, still runs narrated cruises out of Greenville from late June through mid-October. It spent decades after the Depression towing log booms — the last log drive on the lake ran until 1975 — before a nonprofit restored it in the 1990s. The adjoining museum covers that logging history in more depth than the cruise narration has time for.