I woke up a little earlier today and worked more on my blog. I had to catch up now that I had some decent Internet service. Bob got up around 7 and by 8:30 we were ready to leave. This is definitely one place I’d like to come back to. It is very beautiful and scenic….maybe spend a couple more days here on the way back. The temp was 78 under sunny, blue skies. (NH has special exits for state run liquor stores in the Interstate. Very interesting!) We crossed the Salmon Falls River at Portland, NH and headed into Maine. Woo-hoo!!!
We stopped to pay the toll for the first time on the Maine Turnpike.
We couldn’t use any other road to get where we wanted to go without losing a lot of time, so we bit the bullet. The road is newly paved and definitely nice! About 10 Corvettes passed us on a Sunday morning ride to somewhere. It was a beautiful day for it! There were fewer trucks on the road today, but more RVs. Must be the end of the 4th of July weekend traffic. We passed an area near Wolf Neck Woods State Park. It had a marina and we could tell that the tide was definitely out. It looked like a neat boating area.
On I-95, we passed numerous signs with warnings about watching for moose on the highway. That would be something to see!
We stopped at a wayside to check tires and do a bathroom break. We joked about stopping in Kennebunkport to visit the Kennedy clan, but we didn’t think anyone would be home.
The further into Maine we got, the more it began to look like the “North Woods”.
Now all we needed was the moose and the bears to make it complete. There were no more toll roads after Augusta. We ended up paying at total of $9.50 for tolls for our travels on the Maine Turnpike. As we headed northeast to Bangor, the temp started to drop a little to 76 degrees after climbing to a high of 83 at its warmest point today. It got quite breezy, but the trees along the highway became our windblock.
We ate our lunch on the road so we could make good time after making a couple of pit stops already before noon. We crossed over the Penobscot River and headed south to the Bar Harbor region and Acadia National Park.
As we neared the town of Ellsworth, we passed a funky museum. It would have been interesting to stop, but we were on a mission!
After passing through the town of Trenton, we crossed a bridge over the Mt. Desert Narrows, a body of water that connects Western Bay with Frenchman’s Bay and then the Atlantic Ocean. Our campground sits on a peninsula that pokes into the Mt. Desert Narrows, just 4 miles from the entrance to Acadia National Park and 9 miles the the historic town of Bar Harbor. Acadia National Park is the only national park in the Northeast and covers more than 49,000 acres. It encompasses nearly half of Mt. Desert Island and a scattering of smaller islands nearby. We arrived in Hadley’s Pt. Campground at 1:45 and checked in behind 3 other RVs which were ahead of us.
Bob was out in no time and we went to locate our site. We would have 3 full days to explore the park and the surrounding area, so we set up our complete camp this time.
We hope to be able to sleep with our windows open and the AC off while we are here. That would be nice. I decided to do some wash while we have easy access to a laundry at the campground, so I brought along the computer to work on my blog while I was doing laundry. Bob got to relax a little by himself at the campsite and keep an eye on Auggie. He dropped me off, got me hooked up to the campground Internet, and off he went for a little “alone” time. After about an hour, he came back to pick me up. We cleaned up and relaxed with a cocktail before dinner. Tonight we would have an easy dinner of sloppy joes and rest up for our first day of exploring the area. We are really looking forward to that!
