Acadia Revisited: Schoodic Peninsula

The Schoodic Peninsula, visible from Bar Harbor, is four miles away from the rest of Acadia (as the crow flies) on the main land.  It has far less commercial development in the area.  In fact most of the nearby village shops and restaurants were closed for the season.  Driving over took about 45 minutes on this beautifully clear day.

While leaving Mt. Desert Island we stopped at a small bakery and coffee shop for some delicious breakfast sandwiches.  Their deserts looked irresistible so I purchased a whoopie pie for later.

The peninsula has a single main one-way loop road that winds through the woods and along the coast.  There is a relatively new campground that must be wonderfully quiet even in the middle of summer.  This is the part of the park you want to visit when your goal is avoiding the massive tour buses and cruise ships.

Since this was our last full day of vacation we spent most of the morning and afternoon stopping at overlooks to take in the scenery.  There are many trails hidden inland and we walked along one of them, starting at a parking lot for Schoodic Institute.  The school is a nonprofit research and learning institution that looks amazing.  We saw a few recreational fields and large dormitories.  Along our hike we found many plants had hand-written identification tags, clearly remnants from a class nature walk.  The school isn't just for kids, too.  It has a fellowship program for K-12 teachers so they can become more proficient in science!

Scenes like this really reminded me of John Hodgman's description of Maine's deadly natural beauty in Vacationland:

"[...] The waters of Maine are made of hate and want to kill you.

The ocean in Maine is traumatically cold.  If you make the mistake of going into it, 

every cell in your body will begin shouting the first half of the word "hypothermia" into your brain;
the second half will simply be frozen tears.  

And the beaches of Maine offer no relief as you launch yourself back onto the shore, 

because the beaches of Maine are made out of jagged stones shaped like knives."

Well, at least the seabirds don't mind!

Whoopie!

In the afternoon we treated ourselves to some juicy lobster rolls 

at a road-side lobster pound on Route 3.

After a bit of last wanderings around Bar Harbor we relived past vacation memories at our favorite bar in town, Galyn's.  Their drinks were so lovely and they prepared a blueberry cosmo for me even though it's no longer on their menu (funnily enough our server said that it is still listed in their computer system).  For dinner we decided to get take-out pizza from a cute Italian restaurant (Epi's) and head back to the camp site so we could start packing.  The pizza was absolutely delicious but we did not have much time to sit and enjoy because taking the camp site down took a lot longer than expected.  I built a large fire with our leftover firewood, which resisted the rain that came later.  It turns out that greasy pizza boxes are REALLY flammable lol.

The air truly felt like it had transitioned into the fall season as we crawled into the tent for the night under a light drizzle.  The next morning all that we had to do was toss sleeping bags into the car and throw the damp tent into a bin.

We had another scrumptious breakfast at 2 Cats before driving a solid 12 hours all the way back to Maryland.  Along the way we stopped at a store in Portland and purchased an embarrassing amount of beer to share at home.

I sincerely hope that we have another chance to visit Maine in the future.