Vistas Galore

We are finding here in Bar Harbor that when you have a day off, and the weather forecast is dry for several hours in a row, you jump on the opportunity to get outside and take a walk! Last week the day after our excursion to the Blue Hill Peninsula we had a decent morning forecast, so we packed up the pups and headed off to do the Beech Cliff Loop Trail, and then look for a few more caches here on the island.

Beech Cliff Loop Trail is a short 1 mile loop with beautiful views of Echo Lake and Frenchman's Bay out to the ocean. I know our walks have been on the shorter side this year, but Chelsea is getting up there, eleven years old now, and simply isn't up to long or strenuous walks. And it would break our hearts to leave her behind by herself, so we all go together and we pace ourselves to her :-).

On the way, though, first we stopped for a cache in the historic village of Somesville, the oldest settlement on Mount Desert Island, founded in 1761. Unfortunately, the little museum has very limited hours...

but the most photographed bridge in the State of Maine is always open!

across the street is a pretty little pond

which drops over a small dam with a fish ladder built on the side (so the alewives can get up into the calm waters for spawning)...

and flows into Somes Sound, the only fjord on the East Coast. Very pretty stop, and a successful caching venture.

On to the Beech Cliff Loop Trailhead.

The trail starts out in a dark forested area

with pine trees of all different sizes lining both sides of the trail. I love pine trees, but unfortunately the pine pollen is absolutely killing us..

Our typical hiking formation: Chelsea several feet behind Al....

Casey several feet ahead :-)!

Out of the woods, onto the cliffs, and what a view!

They really weren't kidding when they said the trail hugs the cliff edge

Looking down at Echo Lake. And yes Chelsea needs a boost to get up this "step"!

A view of the swimming beach at the end of Echo Lake, one of two swimming areas on the Island...the other being Sand Beach on the Park Loop Road.

The trail then loops back through the forest

and one last view before heading back down to the parking area.

With clouds rolling in, we stopped at Long Pond for another cache. This is a very popular area for canoeing and kayaking. We haven't gone yet, but they say if you go early in the morning its so peaceful and quiet and you can see all kinds of birds, particularly herons, eiders and loons.

Another cache led us to Seal Cove. We

 logged the find, and raced raindrops back to the truck.

We finished up the adventures for the day with lunch at a favorite spot in Southwest Harbor, The Little Notch Bakery. Panninis today, and of course some blueberry and raspberry danish for later. It did not disappoint :-).

We are getting busier now the closer we get to the Fourth of July holiday. We have been having some issues though, which have made things a bit more difficult. Our campground has an in-ground pool. They've had problems with the liner, and the company has been patching it to keep it going. Well, this year the patching is not holding, so when it was being prepared for the start of peak season, it actually ripped bad enough that it can no longer be repaired. So, we are currently waiting for a new liner to come in and be installed. In the meantime, the pool is not able to be used, so we are having to call a couple hundred reservations coming in over the next couple of weeks and inform the guests that the pool will be out of commission during their stay. You can imagine this is not sitting well with some of our guests! So its been a difficult few days making these calls, and helping guests with alternate options. 

We did have a nice night last Thursday with the other four workamper couples. We all got together after work at our "worker community site" (a small unusable area in between our rigs) and had a lobster bake dinner. We bought live lobsters at the lobster pound in Trenton, everyone brought a side dish, and the boiling was on! It was all delicious, and we have a really nice group of folks working this year...again. We have been so fortunate in that aspect, and it makes up for a myriad of smaller annoyances.

I have a ton of new pictures to go through from this last two days off, so bear with me, and my next posing will have pictures of seals, coastline and.......puffins!!Not to mention lots of company is arriving in the next week or so, so hopefully pictures of good times with good friends will be coming as well :-).