On the road again!

After 18 months, it's nice to dust off the old travel blog and discover that it's still there, waiting to record our adventures!

This is going to be a short trip, but still exciting, adding a new national park to our list:  Acadia National Park, on the coast of Maine, making it a drivable adventure.  Still, it's farther than you'd think...  about an 8 hour drive.  So we left very early - just before 5am- which, this time of the year, means it was pitch black.  Plus, it was raining hard, making the the first few hours of the trip rather unpleasant.

The early start made it possible to get by Boston before rush hour and we crossed through to New Hampshire just in time to stop by the NH Liquor store- a very important stop whenever one reaches NH....

As predicted by the forecast, as soon as we left the bridge between New Hampshire and Maine in the rearview mirror, the rain stopped, and then both the sky, and the trees kept getting brighter and brighter as we kept driving north.  

By the time we arrived in Freeport - for the obligatory stop at the LlBean main store (it's not really a store, it's an entire campus of stores!), it was sunny and mild.  And of course, we had our first lobster roll - it was as good as it looks.

From there,  we continued north until Augusta, but then took the more scenic ME 3 and US 1 roads and were not disappointed by the sights.  It's one of these roads where at every turn you have a lovely sight, or a quaint little town, but one cannot stop at every lovely spot or one would never get anywhere (now that I think about it though, that may be a delightful way to travel - just head to somewhere but stop at every interesting place...  I'll have to think about that for our next road trip.....)  

We made it to out hotel - about 1 mile from the entrance to the National park, and 1 mile to the center of Bar Harbor by 3pm, giving me some time for a little walk:  

The hotel borders the park, and some of the trails are reachable from the back of our room.  While those are not the most spectacular views one expects from Acadia, they are very nice.  

Also, the woods are full of varied mushrooms, I'll have to investigate that a bit more in the next few day.

The town of Bar Harbor is pretty, and the Harbor even more so (picture on top of blog), but it was REALLY busy!  (on a random Monday in October, in Maine??????) and - having gotten up at 4am- we were just too tired to deal with crowds.  So we got really good take out from one of the many restaurants in town (the halibut and the blueberry pie were truly excellent!) and ate in our room. 

The weather looks like it is going to be nice for the next few days- looking forward to a boat trip around the bay in the morning, and some hiking in the afternoon tomorrow.