Acadia National Park

Two days before we left, I made a reservation at the Wonder View Inn for August 13-16.  Classes at BU started on August 18.  We left for Acadia on August 12, 2026.  On the way we stopped at the Quabbin Reservoir and took a walk there with John. 

We stopped for the night outside of Portland.  The next morning, we picked up lunch and chocolate cat cookies at Trader Joe's, and then spent some time at the Portland Head Light.

Lighthouse is in the background by Laura's elbow.

 before continuing on to Bar Harbor.  On the way we made a reservation for Cadillac Mountain at 4:30.

Dave heard that a marker identified the exact top of Cadillac summit, so we decided to search for it.  We found 3 summit markers!

Laura gave her rock climbing persona full range!

After Cadillac Mountain, we checked in at the hotel and took the Island Explorer shuttle to downtown Bar Harbor for dinner.

We ended up eating dinner at Route 66.

The next day we went into the park again.   After picking up our park pass, we tried driving to some of the sights in the park, but parking was so difficult, we drove back to the visitors center and ended up taking the bus to Jordan Pond where we hiked for a bit.  The hike around the pond has lots of single path boardwalk, which we didn't take pictures of.  We ate our picnic lunch afterwards overlooking the pond.

Acadia has lots of rock climbing opportunities.

We didn't get all that far because we wanted to save some energy to walk to Bar Island at low tide that evening.

  After we got back to the mainland, we picked up some fresh blueberry pie and ate dinner, pie and ice cream at the hotel.

Laura was very psyched to do the popular Beehive Hike in the park.  Dave went with her, but the boys and I did the less thrilling, but still somewhat strenuous hike requiring lots of scrambling over rocks, bowl hike.

We all got together at the top of the Beehive hike.

After that we were not up to any more major hikes for the day.  We stopped for lunch by the beach and then continued on the bus around the park.  We did get off at Thunder Hole, but our timing was not optimal to get the full experience of that particular stop.  Laura enjoyed some more rock climbing anyway.  

That evening we went back downtown for dinner at the Side Street Cafe.  We also bought more pastries to enjoy with the partially melted ice cream Dave insisted on buying our first morning in Bar Harbor.  

On our final day, we took Lulu's Lobster Boat tour before heading home.