Where Mountains Meet the Sea

 

We got back to Minnesota last evening ending with an extended bus ride from the airport—several river-area roads are closed because of the floods making other roads busier than usual.  We still were able to connect to Makiko’s 68 bus that dropped us off 1/2 block from our house.  These photos are from the Gorham Trail hike in Acadia National Park on Maine’s Mount Desert Island.

This hike was described in the literature as “moderate” difficulty with an optional Cadillac Cliffs detour that we explored.  This was the more difficult part of the hike—difficult but not dangerous.  Our hiking mantra has always been “hike until it gets dangerous and then turn around”.

We were reminded of a hike we did in Victoria, Canada that had a sign like this announcing “This is not the summit”.  Sometimes when you are high up in the mountains, you can’t really see if you’re on the highest point or not.

I don’t know what this pose is.  Sue probably asked me to look goofy and/or stupid.  Or, more likely, I naturally assumed a goofy/stupid pose.

We met some Houston people on this mountain, too.

Asticou, the bed and breakfast fat cat

I’ll talk about the tides in a later post but for some reason, we seemed to see a lot of low tide in our time on the Maine coast.

This is on top of Cadillac mountain at around 1200 feet above sea level.  We drove up here.  Apparently, if you stand here at sunrise, you are the first to see the sunrise on the eastern seaboard of the US.  The name Cadillac comes from a French explorer and later someone in Detroit also adopted his name for a certain luxury car.  Cruise ships frequent Bar Harbor.  The line in the water is the breakwater.

You can also see the sunset on top of Cadillac Mountain.  Right next to us there was a group of four really loud French-speaking Harley Davidson-riding bikers.  They were probably on a road trip from a French speaking part of Quebec or less likely, they flew over from France and rented some Harleys and bought some used grubby Harley clothing.  They were speaking in very loud French but for some reason broke into English for the filthier words.  An English speaking mother and daughter moved away from them after the first volley of F-bombs.

With a camera it is difficult to show depth and height.  I think this is a view of the “Beehive,” one of the dangerous hikes—more on that later (no, we did not attempt the Beehive).