Acadia National Park - Day 1

Hold your horses...this post is long!

We woke up sort of early, excited I think, and decided to shoot to make the 8:33 shuttle that picks up at the front of our campground. I keep calling it a campground, but it's really an RV park with a sprinkling of tent sites. There's really no difference, I think, you just either have an RV or you put up your tent. Some people have both.

The shuttle that picks up here goes all over the island including the rinky-dink airport here in town and drops you off at the village center of Bar Harbor, a really awesome little town. From there, you catch other shuttles that take different routes throughout Acadia. Here are some pictures of the center of Bar Harbor.

We walked over to the NPS station where you can buy your entry passes into Acadia and got the Interagency Annual Pass for $80. If you plan on seeing multiple national parks, it's really a good deal. It basically covers entry for the entire family and one vehicle for a year. Easy for us since we plan on seeing lots of national parks this upcoming year.

We decided to get sandwiches to take with us for lunch and the NPS ranger suggested the Downeast Deli. Everyone got a sandwich and we also got a few muffins and a cinnamon roll...really good. (Look at cute little Jacob through the window!)

The NPS ranger also explained to us that the name Bar Harbor comes from a sand bar in town that is only exposed during low tide. Then, you can walk across it to a smaller, but still large, island. It just happened to be the perfect time to go walk across, so we checked it out. Even the walk over there through town was pretty cool. On that smaller island, there are some trails, but the people we asked about them said the real payoff view was about an hour hike each way and that's not really an option with Jacob. We were happy to have seen the sandbar.

We walked directly back to the village center to catch one of the shuttles to our first stop, Thunder Hole. Incoming waves to a small cave inside an inlet causes huge water splashes and a sound like distant thunder. I think the effect is substantially larger during high tides, but it was cool nonetheless.

I don't know why this video turned out so bad, but it's something. You can at least see how excited the kids were about it.

We may have gotten too close to the water which was crashing on the rocks pretty violently when a lady on the walkway yelled out to us, "That is really dangerous!" It wasn't until then that I realized we were the only people out there. Another guy ventured out later, but we did get too close probably. She clearly thought we were idiots.

On to our next stop...Sand Beach! The kids have their swim suits on despite our warnings that the water will be really cold and the high temperature today is only about 78. We ate lunch here on some rocks in the shade and the kids went "swimming" which really just meant splashing around a little about ankle deep. I think the girls did get in all the way once just to say that they did it. The water really was cold. Apparently, there are very few sandy beaches in Maine as most of them are rocky as you can see in many of the pictures, so this is sort of a treat here. By the way, those Downeast Deli sandwiches were fantastic.

We hopped back on the shuttle and headed to Bubble Rock. We're not really sure why it's called that, but it's just a trail up to a great view point with a huge boulder that appears as if it might fall off a cliff, although I suspect it will last there for hundreds of years. Mommy freaked out a little every time anyone pushed on it, but that's what people do here.

We headed back to HQ on the shuttle and Mommy took the kids swimming. While they swam, she and Jacob actually found a bunch of wild blueberry plants just behind the pool! Pretty incredible.