I got a little sidetracked from the blog! When I have a lot of pictures to edit, I tend to ignore them, then the pile up (NOTE TO SELF: don't do this.) We've been back from Maine for almost 2 months, so some details are fuzzy, but the pictures should do this justice and help jog my memory. We said goodbye to the Sprucewold Lodge on the morning of Monday, August 5 and headed to Bar Harbor. On the way we stopped at the Pemaquid Lighthouse and the Rockland breakwater lighthouse. Rockland was on our "list of things to do" but Pemaquid was a last minute addition. The owner of the Sprucewold Lodge highly recommended it, and it was worth it. I don't have any phone pictures of it, but it was just a beautiful setting and had lots of exposed rocks for us to climb on. The girls had a blast!
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| Enjoying the porch of the Sprucewold Lodge |
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| making friends everywhere she goes.. |
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| Good-bye Sprucewold Lodge! We enjoyed our rustic stay :) |
The final road into Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park was breathtaking.
We pulled into Bar Harbor and made quick work of finding our campground and making camp. We had a HUGE 3-room tent, courtesy of Doug and Christina White. This was car camping, but we still loved it. Each night we would put the girls to bed and Mike and I would sit by the fire awhile, then we would move our chairs away from the light and just stare at the sky. There were SO MANY stars - we saw shooting stars each night and a TON of satellites! Seeing satellites was neat - very unexpected. They would move across the sky much faster than airplanes, but much slower than shooting stars. You could easily follow their track above you. It was perfect camping weather too. No humidity & clear skies every day with highs in the low 70s and lows in the mid 50s. We could not have asked for better weather!
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| Bar Harbor! |
Bar Harbor was such a cute town. There wasn't much to it, just touristy shops and restaurants, but it was small and quaint. We could have spent more time wandering through and exploring, but we kept ourselves busy in Acadia during most of our time there. Geddy's was our favorite - it had a shop downstairs and restaurant upstairs. The girls had their meals served on frisbee's that they got to take home! The owners were in the shop and they were really nice and share lots of good information with us. Summer got her souvenir there - a Bat Moose t-shirt! She still asks to wear it every day.
Most of our time, though, was spent exploring the amazing Acadia National Park. All of Maine was so beautiful but this was the best. We kept comparing it's beauty to Alaska - just without the icebergs! The green trees, the red rock cliffs, the crystal clear waters and blue skies...3 days was not close to enough time to spend there. I think this is a trip we will take again, maybe next year or maybe when the girls are older and can do more hikes. Every turn we made, we found ourselves saying "wow, look at that!" Our favorite was probably Cadillac Mountain. It's the highest point on the Atlantic coast and for a lot of the year, it's the first place to be touched by the sun in the United States. One day up there we found a patch of wild blueberries and ate them for lunch! We visited Jordan Pond and had their famous popovers, we saw Thunder Hole and also made a stop at "Sand Beach". That was funny because it's one of the only sand beaches around (hence the name..) but the girls weren't very impressed by it, I guess because we have sand beaches at home! The water was FRIGID....for most of the year it doesn't get out of the 50s! Kate and Summer couldn't understand why there were so many people in such cold water. I tried to explain that we get to be at the beach all year round but most people don't ever see a beach so they want to go in the ocean. My girls are spoiled by where we live and they had no idea (still don't)!
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| National Park road in Acadia |
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| Mike and the girls admiring the view atop Cadillac Mountain |
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| the drive down Cadillac Mountain |
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| Sand Beach |
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| trail run! |
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| artists on the rocks |
Our last afternoon in Bar Harbor we headed to Southeast Harbor, which is home to the Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse, one of the most photographed lighthouses in the country. It was another beautiful setting with more great rocks to climb on. You would think with so many lighthouses and so much rocky shoreline that we would get tired of seeing them and climbing the rocks. I certainly thought we would at the beginning of the trip. But each place was so unique, and the weather was so perfect that we enjoyed each and every one as much as the one before.
We finished up our time with pirate golf, because the girls spent most of that last afternoon in the car. They loved it until the canons started going off and then they both got freaked out!
We woke up early the next morning and headed out - in perfect time too, it started to rain as we put our last bags in the car. We drove about 3 1/2 hours that day down to Portland, which was the beginning of the end of our amazing trip.
