08/17/2026
See how one of these kayaks looks like it doesn’t belong? See how the light blue one is longer and has an actual seat hanging down? That’s because it’s an LL Bean kayak in a rack of cheap kayaks that came from Dick’s sporting goods— at least a 500 dollar difference.
And it’s not even ours.
We’ve run an Airbnb for more than 6 years now and we never know what we’ll find when we come in to clean. Broken chairs and hammocks, glitter all over the floor, broken glass, leftover food and bottles of leftover alcohol—all standard fair and to be expected (except the glitter, left by grown women who had a “girls weekend” and signed our guestbook as ‘team kicka**.’ What fun they must have had!) . We did not expect to have one of our kid-sized kayaks replaced with this fancy one.
What happened to our little green el cheapo? We don’t know. Maybe it capsized, maybe it was damaged somehow or maybe someone grabbed the wrong one and left theirs. The group that was here has come every single year, so at least 6 times and he fessed up the broken chair and offered to pay for it but said nothing about the kayak and I didn’t either.
They appeared to have had a fun time—a little bike jump was set up at the bottom of a hill by the water and an old BMX bike of my sons had been used apparently to careen down the hill and jump into the water by the looks of the tracks.
They also somehow got down a “widow maker” that had happened recently when a dead part of a tree broke off and was hanging about 10 feet up in the air straight up and down because it was caught in a limb. Scout had brought up the equipment to get it down safely but we found it in the fire pit half charred—all 10 feet of it. That’s scary! I’m glad no one was hurt because trees like that, even ones that are not that big around like that one, are called “widow maker” for a reason.
Come to think of it though, maybe that’s what happened to little green! That dangling tree was actually pretty close to the kayaks. Maybe it fell on it and crushed it and they replaced it with theirs.
We will probably never know. 🤷♀️
The Forks, Maine
