Acadia Park, Maine and then southward bound…

I know this is late but we’ve been so busy this last month. I really don’t know how we ever had time to work!  But I am really excited to tell you about Acadia National Park in Maine.  We made this reservation in March and had really been looking forward to it.  Funny how things work out though.  I keep saying we never know what is going to be around the next corner.  This really came into play for our stopover in New Hampshire as well as Maine.  I really just thought of our stop in New Hampshire as a stop over on our way to Maine and as I hope you could tell from our last blog post, the sights and the fall colors in the White Mountains of New Hampshire were incredible.   And then ever since March, I was excited about our trip to Maine but had this idea that the fall colors would be the most vibrant of all.  Don’t get me wrong, I was not at all dissappointed with the sights in Maine, it just wasn’t what I expected.   The trees near our campground and along most of the scenic drives were mostly evergreens without much fall color but that rocky coastline along the ocean and around every bend…well, wow, is all I can say.

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We stayed on the Schoodic Peninsula which is part of Acadia National Park for 10 days and I have to say it really was the nicest campground we have ever stayed at.  It is only 2 years old, the sites are large and spaced out well and all the sites are gravel with nice hiking trails right from the campground.  5 stars for sure!  And then we were only a 15 minute drive to the tip of the peninsula, which was amazing!  It was covered by large boulders, crashing waves and a great view of the sunset every night.

We made sure to hit all the recommended sites on Mt. Dessert (also part of Acadia Park).  The scenic loop drive there was very cool with one scenic overlook after another, including the top of Cadillac Mountain and Jordan Pond.

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We did have a couple of fun nights at some of the local places as well.  We ate at a local restaurant called the Pickled Wrinkle which had live entertainment nightly.  In case you were wondering, a pickled wrinkle is a large sea-snail which is pickled and is considered a downeast Maine delicacy. And no, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to try them.   We did enjoy a couple of cold beers and the live entertainment was so bad,  it was good!

And then, on a recommendation from one of the rangers at the campground we found a fantastic lobster place.  They had lobster cages all around the outside dock and only served up the fresh catch from that morning.  It was definitely the best lobster I have ever tasted.

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Staying 10 days here allowed us to do a lot including kayaking one day in a beautiful cove near our camp.  I have to say that this was the first time I was ever frightened while kayaking.  We didn’t take the low tide into consideration when we went out and when we were returning to shore, what was a wide easy-flowing creek going out had turned into a narrow path of water rushing against us.  When we tried to paddle through it, it just pushed us away and turned the kayak sideways.  We ended up going to shore before the narrowing and carried the kayaks a couple hundred yards over the rocks.  Well, that was a lesson learned not to underestimate mother nature.

Another nice thing about this area was that we were able to bring the puppies along with us just about everywhere we went.  As you can see, they were quite happy about that as well!

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Well, I promise I’m working on getting caught up on the blog. We’ve been near Philadelphia visiting with our kids, went to Washington DC and the outer banks of No. Carolina and are continuing our adventures southward, so stay tuned!