Acadia Day Two and the Dover 6K walk/whine

What a relaxing, refreshing day. Not a refreshing night, by any means – on the gravel ground with no sleeping pad in the pouring rain – it gets low 50’s high 40’s at night, pretty chilly - but at least the tent stayed dry -- on the inside and brought a great day!

First we ran down to the nearest local gas station for some ice and coffee – then to grocery store quickly for some smore supplies for dinner. We hopped on the Island Bus (they have free bussing all through Acadia National Park) to Bar Harbor to exchange to another bus to Sand Beach. The bus was crazy – like the bus in Harry Potter – we held on to our seat rails! Speeding around small mountain roads and nearly running people over – quite an experience!

We didn’t realize what we were getting into at Sand Beach so we didn’t pack swimsuits, but we rolled up our pants and went to wade in the waves anyway. It was so much fun we soon ended up in all the way to the waist – in denim! We played and played in the waves – Brianna kept screaming AHHH! AHHH! Then we hiked up the mountain in wet denim pants and flip flops (on a nice cut gravel trail) about one mile to look at Thunder Hole and catch the next bus down the mountain. This was a better bus.

After Thunder Hole it was onto Bar Harbor, a tourist trap town

if we ever saw one, but a pleasant one. We went into one shop

with about 30 different flavors of homemade fudge. We bought little pieces of snickers fudge, chocolate wild blueberry fudge and chocolate mint fudge. Yum! Then, in the foodie tradition we hit the nearest ice cream parlor and were amazed by the flavor line up. Jamey and I both had Black Raspberry Disaster with raspberry ice cream, chocolate fudge, raspberries, and chocolate raspberry candy. Wow! Brianna had Maine Survivor. Pretty much if you can put it in ice cream it was in this ice cream. Chocolate, chocolate chips, chocolate chip cookie bits, fudge swirls, peanuts and peanut butter cups. Avery had Dinosaur tracks – Neon blue ice cream, chocolate chunks and marshmallows! What a dining experience!

Then we moved on to the Bass Harbor lighthouse and the Dover 7K charity walk/whine. We rode the bus all the way past our campground to the lighthouse stop. We didn’t realize that the lighthouse was away from the road almost a half mile. The bus driver said he came back to that stop in 30 minutes soooo…we power walked all the way down to the lighthouse which was honestly a little disappointing, took a very quick look then power walked all the way back to the bus stop. As we crossed the final bend we saw the bus LEAVE. Ahhhh! So, we had an hour and a half to wait for the next bus (because it loops around) or we could just start walking back to camp and hope we caught a bus on the way. So we walked…and walked…and walked. Brianna’s feet hurt, my left calf hurt, Jamey’s side and his toe hurt, Avery’s tummy hurt. We whined and whined and whined, and enjoyed the scenery. We stopped for some of our fudge on the side of the road for awhile then walked some more. They had kilometers marked for cyclers on the whole path, so we know we walked just over 7 km back to camp. That bus never did catch up to us. Whew! We decided on the way that we would walk for charity, so we decided to walk for the Dover Returning Adult Student Charity—donations accepted (haha).

Finally at the camp we flopped down and made some campfire pizza and three different kinds of smores, nutella smores, mint patty smores and regular smores and turned in. We burned our marshmellows to the perfect taste, but I was the only one who liked burned marshmellows. Brianna espescially didn't like them .

We are looking forward to Boston and showers and soft beds tomorrow, but we’ve had a great time camping here in Acadia, seeing the beauty of nature and enjoying the ocean.