Day Ten - Take Me to the Park!!

June 30, 2016 – Acadia National Park

Although I’m up a little after five, we don’t make it to our complimentary continental breakfast until nearly ten!  We've been busy making arrangements for our whale-watching tour on Saturday morning and for our Freefall tickets for when we get home. 

They have a lot of bread products, but there are hard-boiled eggs and apples and good decaf coffee, as well as orange and cranberry juices.  There are other food choices, too, like breakfast sandwiches and burritos.  They’re just not GF.

View from our balcony.  Poor us!

We eat and scurry to the car so we can begin exploring Acadia National Park.  Our first stop is the Visitors’ Center where we get a map and a few gifts.  If you have a senior parks pass all you need is a hang tag in which to display it and admission is free.

There is a loop road, which goes all around the park, and we follow it, stopping at every look out to keep chasing the perfect splashing wave!  You’d think we were surfers, the way we count the waves to guess which ones will be the most dramatic!

At one stop we are photographing beaver dams when a deer appears on the slope down to the pond!  At another we see a seagull eating a crab.

Stop after stop offer new and more picturesque scenes and it is just so hard to quit snapping just one more!  Eventually I have to eat the apple I saved from breakfast and shortly after Marilyn has cashews and raisins.  And so do I! 

 The loop road is one way only.  Where it joins back up with the two-way road you can begin the ascent of Cadillac Mountain, which is 1530 feet tall.  The view from the top is everything you’d expect.  You can see Bar Harbor and all the little islands, as well as the Scootic Peninsula, next door.  One of the displays says that Blue Hill is a good spot for sunset and we decide to come back for that.

Can we say low tide?

 At one of the stops we see several park employees carrying out some field work.  They are taking measurements and samples and we assume they are doing some sort of environmental monitoring.  There is a lady of Asian descent, from New Jersey, with whom we chat about the park and how clean and relatively inexpensive she finds it!  This is her first national park and she’s impressed!

Coming down the mountain we decide to go into Bar Harbor and have dinner at Jordan Pond Restaurant, which has been recommended to us by three different people!  Marilyn’s heel is acting up and we aren’t looking for any more hiking today.  We’ve done quite enough of that!  We agree to drive in, rather than either walking to Jordan’s, which is pretty close, or taking the free shuttle from our hotel.  We aren’t sure where the Village Green is and that’s where the shuttle drops off its passengers.

We find a spot pretty close to Jordan’s to leave the car and then find that Jordan’s closes at 2:00!  So much for breakfast all day!  The lady next door gives us the hours and also tells us how to find the Village Green.

We’re really hungry now and go to the Two Cats Restaurant, which is the closest place on the map.  We walk there and find that it, too, only does breakfast.  Frustrated, we go back to the car, drive back to the hotel, and have dinner there, once.  It’s a thirty second walk from our room and that’s a big plus tonight!  The special is pulled pork with polenta, fried banana peppers and brandied peaches.  We both order it and find it scrumptious!  It has a dollop of guacamole with ranch dressing mixed in that sets everything off to perfection.  Marilyn also has dessert, a homemade blueberry pie a la mode!  Abby, our waitress brings two spoons and forks;  but I’m too stuffed to have more than a token taste.

We just have time to get back to Cadillac Mountain for sunset.  There are probably three dozen people scattered along the hillside, many with tripods, and we all patiently wait and watch as the flaming ball descends to it nightly rest.  Very cool!

As the afterglow is waning, people pack up and head back down the mountain.  Marilyn saw a road that should take us back home a little quicker than our original route;  but we wind up back in Bar Harbor.  This time we pass the Village Green and there is a band concert in progress in the little band shell.  Too cute!  It might be fun to stay;  but there is no parking anywhere and we both really just want to get home to a shower and bed.  Maybe another night.  We’ll be here until July 5^th, so we should be able to work that out, if there will be another one.  After a few false starts we make it home.  Great day!  Great sunset!  Great king-sized beds!