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Katie Sturino’s Favorite Maine Place

The entrepreneur and influencer made near-daily visits to Camden's Mount Battie.

Mount Battie, Camden, Maine, Katie Sturino's favorite place
Photographed by Benjamin Williamson
Katie Sturino
NEW BOOK
Body Talk: How to Embrace Your Body and Start Living Your Best Life, out May 25
MOST MISSED TAKEOUT
Long Grain, Camden’s Thai emporium
MORNING MAINE MEMENTO
Coffee beans from Belfast’s Blue Streak Roasters, which Sturino has delivered

Last March, when it suddenly looked wise to leave New York City for a while, Katie Sturino knew Maine was where she wanted to hunker down for quarantine. For almost 20 years, it’s been a favorite vacation spot for the 40-year-old founder of the body-care-products company Megababe, who’s also a podcast host, a beauty and style influencer with a substantial social-media following, and the author of a new book on body positivity, dropping this month. Prior to COVID, she’d mostly spent time around the Kennebunks. Last summer, after putting in 14 days of isolation in a rental in Lamoine, Sturino and her husband settled around South Thomaston and St. George, falling hard for the midcoast.

“I’ve always had some romantic notion about Maine,” she says. “I love that it’s not crowded and everywhere you look is a breathtaking view, but I had no idea I’d fall in love with the community aspect as well.”

Most mornings, Katie Sturino and her husband hiked Mount Battie — where, she jokes, they regularly had the oh-so-Maine experience of getting smoked on the trail by an octogenarian (“Mainers are just lifelong activity people,” she marvels). Next, coffee from Green Tree at Lincolnville Beach, then takeout lunch from Rockport’s Maine Street Meats. Afternoons were for kayaking among the seals around St. George’s Rackliff Island.

Sturino’s Instagram audience of more than half a million saw much of this, of course, along with Sturino standing in front of lobsterboats, talking swimsuits and self-esteem; Sturino strolling the harbor, pausing to apply anti-chafing balm; Sturino strutting across a granite beach, modeling a clothing collection she’d designed. Since she started blogging about fashion and body acceptance in 2015, Sturino says, she’s “tapped into a corner of the internet where women of all sizes are just trying to feel good about their bodies.” Her old stomping grounds of the Kennebunks provide a fine Instagram backdrop, she says, “because everything is cute and charming,” but the grittier, rockbound midcoast is a photo-happy influencer’s dream (spotty internet notwithstanding).

It won’t take another quarantine to bring her back, as she misses her Maine summer habits. “I love the routine,” she says. “Waking up and looking out on the water, being physically active in nature, getting to the top of Mount Battie and seeing that view — or even when it’s rainy or foggy. It all just brings you out of your head and into your body in a way that I can’t get somewhere else.”