Acadia National Park

We just got back from a trip up to Acadia National Park. Nuri's daycare was closed for 2 days for teacher training and it seemed like a good time to take a long weekend trip. We drove up on Thursday, which was fairly painless. It was around 5 hours in the car and Nuri napped for a good part of it and watched cartoons for most of the rest of it.

Acadia is located on Mount Dessert Island in Maine, though the park doesn't take up the whole island. There are also a small handful of little towns on the island, mostly tourist towns. We stayed on the mainland in a nearby town, at one of the most "modestly priced" motels we have ever booked, so we were relieved to find that it was clean (though small) and even had a fridge and a microwave! After checking in, we quickly packed a bag and headed out to the town of Bar Harbor to check out some tide pools at low tide.

Getting out of the car, we debated about whether to put Nuri's swimsuit and water shoes on. We decided not to, which turned out to be a mis-estimation of his ambitions to get wet. Before long, Nuri was trudging through the tide-pool in his tennis shoes, sitting in the muddy water, and doing belly flops into it. The only change of clothes we had with us in the car were his swimsuit (go figure) and his water shoes, which he ended up wearing the rest of the trip since his sneakers are still wet!

After a creative dusting/drying off, we headed into the restaurant area for some dinner. We got a take-out pizza and ate it in the town park, where a 7-day jazz festival was going on. Nuri enjoyed the music and the food in the park and also spent some time fishing pennies out of the fountain and throwing them back in.

We planned to go to a star-gazing event inside the park that night, but forgot to bring warmer clothes and quickly realized we would need them. So Sal drove back to the hotel while Nuri and I got some Moosetracks ice cream (my new favorite flavor). What Sal thought would be a quick drive back to the hotel turned out to be a long drive due to some planned night-time construction, so we ended up fairly late to the star-gazing event. Nonetheless, it was completely spectacular! We were amazed at the fantastic visibility of stars on what the guide referred to as a "pretty hazy" night. I don't recall ever seeing stars that clearly, even in Oregon. It was also an incredible location, at Sand Beach. It was pitch black and the sound of the waves hitting the shore was intense.

Nuri fell asleep in the car and we took a non-optimal route home, not yet knowing our way around the park very well. We got close to the hotel and waited in the same construction traffic that Sal had dealt with earlier that evening, though traffic had significantly died down. To our complete horror, they were steam-rolling the road and it appeared when we got home that the construction was directly in front of our road-facing hotel room. It was horridly loud and there were bright flashing lights right outside our room. We miraculously transferred Nuri from the carseat to the bed without waking him. I went to the front desk to see if there were any rooms on the opposite side of the motel. The door to the front office was locked with a sign that said, "Desk closed. No vacancies." On my way back to our room, I asked a construction worker how late the construction was going to be going on and he said all night long. Sal and I were pretty peeved, thinking that our vacation was going to be ruined by two horrible nights' sleep. However, by the time we got ready for bed ourselves, the steam-rolling had moved quite a ways down the road and it turned out to be a rather quiet night after all. Thank goodness for that!!!

The next morning, we drove back into Bar Harbor for some blueberry pancakes (blueberries, and their associated muffins, pancakes, and pies, seem to be the Maine specialty). We went back into Acadia, stopping every so often to try to catch a view at one of the many look-out points. At one point we stopped at the bottom of the Precipice trail, thinking we would climb it. It turns out that it was well-named. A sign at the bottom discourages hikers from taking young children and mentions that some people have been seriously injured and died on the trail. Sal walked up a few feet with Nuri on his shoulders, and eventually came back and returned to the car. While we changed Nuri's diaper, we saw several families start on the trail like us, only to turn back two minutes later once they realized how difficult the climb was. Sal, being a real climber, wanted nothing more than to go up the trail. He said to me, "when they say you've got to make sacrifices for your kids, this is what they're talking about."

We continued on to Sand Beach, to get a better daytime view. It was really a beautiful beach. Most of the rock in Acadia is this beautiful black-and-pink granite and the sand on Sand Beach was a mix of those colors. The rocks in the background were quite beautiful too. It's hard to say whether the general lack of people or the silence of being so isolated played a role, but the waves crashing on the beach seemed very loud and beautiful.

It turned out to be cool and misty both Friday and Saturday. On the one hand, that really inhibited our views of the ocean and made it less appealing to swim. On the other hand, it made for some rather pleasant walking weather. Furthermore, we luckily managed to avoid rain entirely, despite claims of thunderstorms in the weather forecast. Nuri wanted to jump in the waves crashing on the beach, which we let him do until Sal's feet became so painfully numb that he was worried Nuri would get frostbite. So against Nuri's will, we pried him away from the beach and went walking along a trail to Thunder Hole, stopping along the way to enjoy the vistas. We didn't quite make it though. Nuri started falling asleep on Sal's shoulders way to early for his nap. Sal ran back to the car and met us further down the road, where we fed a fussy Nuri his lunch.

He fell back asleep in the car, and we drove back to town to get some lunch and then over to the stables, where there was an entrance to some carriage roads. Acadia has miles and miles of gravel carriage roads, which are traveled only by service vehicles, horse and buggies, bikers, and pedestrians. With our new stroller that has pneumatic tires, we set out on a carriage trail to climb Day Mountain, with Nuri still sleeping. It must have been a roughly 2 mile walk to the summit, though we quit a little more than halfway through. Both of us were tired from the slightly uphill walking (me with my extra 25 lbs and Sal pushing the stroller) and given the misty weather, we figured we wouldn't have seen much at the top anyway. At some point Nuri woke up and eventually wanted out of the stroller, but we promised him that he would get to see some horses if he stayed in the stroller just a little longer. Back at the stables, Nuri got a small glimpse of some horses (he called them "zebras") looking out the window while eating hay.

We returned to Thunder Hole, this time by car. Thunder Hole is a narrow channel in the rocks that ends in a cave. As waves roll into the channel, they seal off the entrance to the cave, compressing air. The compressed air then spews the water back out with a loud (thunder-like) noise and a big splash. You can watch all of this from a viewing platform built above it, which is sometimes closed off to the public due to dangerous conditions (run a google search on Thunder Hole if you want to see what dangerous conditions look like). Nuri had a great time watching this, though what he really wanted to do was climb through the platform railing into the water channel. Eventually we had to remove him from peril and let him climb on some nearby rocks.

We left Thunder Hole and headed over to the Jordan Pond House, the only restaurant facility in Acadia. They are famous for their popovers, a very popular pastry. We wanted to try it but there was no "take-out" option and we were a little worried about Nuri's patience sitting in a restaurant, considering that we still needed to get dinner that night. So we walked past the Pond House and over to Jordan Pond itself. Nuri wanted to swim of course, but we quickly realized that Jordan Pond was part of a local drinking water supply, so swimming was prohibited.

We drove back into Bar Harbor for dinner at a seafood place. Luckily there was an outdoor deck where you could order your food at a window. This was much easier for us to handle with Nuri than sitting indoors. We ventured down the street a ways, in search of some better ice cream. There are tons of little ice cream shops in Bar Harbor. We settled on one and got Moosetracks again, taking it to the park to eat.

We drove back to sand beach to get one more glimpse of the stars but quickly realized that it was so misty, we couldn't see anything. So we went back to the motel. By this time the construction was far enough down the road that it didn't impede us getting back. There was a nice hammock in the back of the motel, which proved useful for putting Nuri to bed.

The next day, after another dose of blueberry pancakes, we set out to drive to the top of Cadillac Mountain, the highest peak in Acadia. The weather was still misty, so we couldn't see much at the top, but we did have a good time walking around the summit. Nuri did his share of rock-climbing and puddle-splashing as usual. We coaxed him back into the car with the promise of swimming ahead and drove over to the southern tip of Echo Lake, where there is a swimming beach. Nuri could care less about the beach toys we brought for him. He was all about the water. He waded in the water until he was so cold that he was shaking. We coaxed him out by asking him to follow the ducks that were wandering around on the sand. And eventually it was getting so close to nap time that we went to go clean off and get back in the car to drive back home. He fell asleep before we got to the car.

On the way back, we stopped near Portland to meet one of Sal's high school friends and his wife and baby. They suggested we meet at a little farm that had a pond and ducks, a petting zoo, and some homemade ice cream. This proved to be an excellent idea. Nuri wandered around, following the ducks, had a snack, went into the playground area to run around, and had some of our ice cream. Then we splurged on a 25 cent bag of bread to feed to the animals. Nuri really liked the pygmy goats and frankly I'm surprised they didn't nip at his fingers. He kept coming back to me for little bits of bread (he called them "sandwich"). As he handed them to the goats, he kept saying his word for thank-you, which sounds like "gimpy." I told him that the goats should be thanking him and he should say, "you're welcome." Nuri, who is getting quite good at figuring out what the subject of sentence is, proceeded to say, "I welcome" every time he handed them bread.

After a couple of hours, we parted ways with Sal's friend and his family and drove the rest of the way home. Nuri watched cartoons in the car on Sal's new netbook. We got home with a day to spare to clean up, unpack, and run errands before returning to work on Monday.