Today was our day to "do" Bar Harbor, Maine, a town I've read about in many books. The Acadia National Park sort of surrounds Bar Harbor, as well as covering an area at the tip of the inlet just north of the island that Bar Harbor is on. I woke up early and got some pictures of the lobster boats going out right beside our campsite.
It was supposed to have gotten down in the 50s last night, but the cloud cover must have kept us a little warmer. It was 64 when I got up before 6:00 (not adjusted to new time zone yet). I coaxed Joe out of bed early too, so we got a good start on our busy day. I checked phone messages just before we got ready to go out the door and found out that we did have to move to a different campsite, so we pulled up stakes and drove up by the office to our new campsite (and away from the water), got reestablished and took off for Winter Harbor, the Schoodic Peninsula, Prospect Harbor and Corea. Since I didn't have anything to fix for breakfast (I had boiled the rest of my eggs to cross the border (probably unnecessarily), and we had run out of cereal and bagels, we opted to find breakfast on the way. We found a place in Winter Harbor so we got that taken care of, then headed on our drove to Schoodic Peninsula, where we spent the next hour or so clambering over rocks on this breath-takingly beautiful rocky coast.
The water was freezing!!! But it was all very beautiful, and the slabs of rocks made you want to just keep walking over to the next viewpoint.
We even investigated some tidal pools in honor of Bridgette and John.
I finally drug Joe off these rocks (actually, I couldn't see him any more and figured he had fallen between the rocks and broken something, but he was fine and eventually worked his way back to the car). And we continued on our drive around this part of the Acadia National Park. We passed some scuba divers taking lessons in the shallow water. I don't know how thick their wetsuits were, but I hope they were pretty warm because that water was really cold. I read on one of the placards that the water temperature was in the 50s, I'm not sure if that was year-round, but I would have guessed it was 32, (freezing)!
As we came around the point and exited the Park, we came upon the tiny harbor of Wonsqueak Harbor, a picture of which is on a cup I purchased later. And we passed lots of lobster traps -- we couldn't figure out why they weren't all in the water because the sea was just dotted with different colored buoys marking either lobster traps or crab traps.
. Joe pulled into a gas station looking for his soda -- not luck, but I did get a photo of "Lobster Joe" here.
"Prospect Harbor is home to the last sardine cannery in the U.S., signified by the iconic "Stinson Man" sign. The factory is being reborn as a lobster processing facility." No surprise.
Next up was the Village of Corea. We drove to this one little wharf that was just loaded down
with lobster paraphenalia. Lobster is big business in this area.
Along the road we found two interesting sights -- a very attractive, wooden woodpecker stuck on a telephone pole, and a huge bird nest, either an eagle or osprey.
We had driven back over to Winter Harbor and picked up a few items at the IGA store, so we stopped back by the RV and dropped them off, paid for another night here, then headed to Bar Harbor. Along the highway we spotted a little flock of wild turkeys.
The town of Bar Harbor was really hopping when we got there. Cars lined every street, traffic was barely moving. We lucked out and found a parking spot right across from a Mexican restaurant, so we had our Mexican fix, then walked through the shops for a little bit. Then we headed out to drive the Park. We missed a road to the Sand Beach, and ended up on the one-way loop road for about 10 miles before we could get headed back in the right direction. Pretty views all along the way.
We then stopped at the Visitor Center (52 steps), got a parking pass (free with our American the Beautiful cards), and headed to the beach with all of our "stuff" (lawn chairs, binoculars, camera).
Kites are popular along this windy coast, and there were a couple of pretty ones flying here.
Reluctantly, we left the beach. However, I found a treasure just before I got to the steps -- a piece of authentic sea rope, and 2 little pieces of driftwood.
We continued on our loop drive (again) and went up to the top of Cadillac Mountain, which is only 1,530 feet, but since it is right on the coast, it provides a lovely 360 degree viewpoint of the Atlantic Ocean, the town of Bar Harbor, and lots of little islands.
Joe took a couple of panorama shots up here too.
Picture-postcard-perfect.
And then the camera battery died (and I forgot to charge the extra) so that was the end of the pictures for the day. We headed out of the Park, stopped for pizza in Ellsworth (I was too tired to mess with cooking or cleaning up), and got back to came about 8:30, worn out from a very good day. The weather was perfect, sunny, probably in the low 70s but crisp from the sea air. We will now have a vision of Bar Harbor when we hear anything about this area in the future.
Side note back to St. John, Joe thinks our "river otters" may have been seals. He read a sign at the Tidal Falls yesterday that there were seals in the area and they were not close enough for us to see very well, so one or the other.
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