Maine Maine Maine!

We did it, we survived! You might have thought that Greg and I were sucked into the great abyss of AMERICA.

One thing I observed is the crazy amounts of American flags:

Calais, Maine

Bar Harbour, Maine

WAAAAAY more pictures after the jump!




The most EPIC American house, it's paint colours colors are even red, white and blue:

Bar Harbour, Maine

We stayed at the Mount Desert Island Campground:

It was a great campground, very well kept with friendly staff. It had a nice floating dock and interesting campsites:

The blue thing at the top is our tent. We had to walk up this really neat trail to get to it and the tent sat on a wooden platform:

Strange things about the States:

 The entire country of Canada is  referred to as "the North"

Eagles carry not ONE, but TWO chainsaws!

People wear strange, strange t-shirts

Places like Wild Blueberry Land exist

Whoopie Pies are EVERYWHERE!

We visited Acadia National Park twice, the first time we hike Cadillac Mountain up a pretty rocky trail. It was a lot of climbing. Cadillac Mountain is the one on the left, it's actually the highest mountain on all of Mount Desert Island (1532 ft) and the trail is only 2.2km. So it was a pretty steep climb.

Greg at the trailhead

Greg scrambling up

More than half way up the mountain

It took us 1 hour and 29 minutes (we stopped for two chats with other hikers) but we made it to the top!

View from the top

Heading back down Cadillac, the trail is marked by these blue paint swatches:

The next day we rented bikes from a shop in Bar Harbour and biked out to the park:

Weeeeeeeeeeeee!

Biking along (and under) the carriage roads in the park

A view of a lake (can't remember the name)!

The trail we road was a loop and at the far end from where we started we had a great view of the Bubble Mountains. Really, bubbles? I can think of more descriptive names, can you?

Just around the corner from this view was a restaurant, being the fancy-pants we are, we ate our lunch on the lawn:

Stopping for a picture by Eagle Lake

A look over one of the bridges in the park

Post bike ride we visited a lovely cafe in downtown Bar Harbour, Lompoc Cafe for beverages and a snack:

We had baked clams, which were AMAZING!!!

Afterwards we went for a proper dinner, I was craving ribs after the 39km of bike riding we did that day. Just like everything in the US it was a HUGE serving size!! I did my best to tackle the portion size but thankfully Greg helped. To illustrate the monstrosity that was my meal here is a very unflattering picture:

We had picked up a camping stove in Saint John before we left, but sadly we didn't test it out. Turns out it was a dud and camping meals ended up being cooked over a fire. We made out pretty well, we had chili and spaghetti (both the chili and sauce we made at home, froze and brought with us), so we had to boil water for the noodles and for coffee in the morning and I successfully cooked scrambled eggs one morning:

We packed up from the campground and headed to Bangor, Paul Bunyan was there to greet us:

Browsing around downtown Bangor we found Paddy Murphys:

We also stumbled upon the Bangor Library. Being the library nerd that Greg is, the chance to check it out wasn't passed up. It was a beautiful old building with pretty high tech and accessible spot...at least from my humbled non-librarian point of view:

We did the standard "lets go shopping in Bangor!" and had success at LL Bean and Target. It turns out I'm not a fan of GIANT box stores all over the place but it was worth going to for sure.