Friday, October 18, 2019: Bar Harbor, Acadia National Park, Jordan's Pond, Joker

We got into our room at about 12:30 am. It is right off the lobby, which has me a bit concerned about the noise in the morning. The room is spacious with one king size bed, a sleeper sofa and a fireplace. They obviously did not know we intended to use the sleep as there were no bed cloths available. I borrowed a blanket and got by just fine.

I got up about 7:00 am and took a couple of photos off our patio before getting cleaned up.

Maria was still asleep and they don't start serving breakfast until 8:00 am, so I roamed around for a bit, capturing the morning light.

Back of the hotel

Our room just off the lobby

Our little patio

Lounge area just off the bar, made up for breakfast

Lounge, they have live piano playing in the evening

Lobby, our room is the double doors in the center

The "Balancing Rock"

Little park next to the hotel

There is a walking path all along the harbor

Maria got up and we had breakfast. Then we decided to drive over to Acadia National Park. Before getting there, we stopped at Schooner Head Overlook.

We stopped at Thunder Hole and sure enough, we heard the thunder.

Then we stopped at Jordan's Pond. We ended up spending the next several hours here. We started down a trail with a sign that stated that it was 1.5 miles in length, or so I thought. It turned out to be the 3.5 mile trail around the entire lake. It took not quite three hours to get around it. Some of the path was very rugged.

The "Bubble"

The temperature was cool, probably in the 50's, but there was a strong breeze which, on occasion resulted in a brisk wind chill. Maria might have wished to bring something a bit heavier and more hiking-like shoes.

My little bandit 

We went counter clockwise around the "pond". Parts of the path were board walk, parts were unimproved detours through the forest, parts were weaving through huge boulders.

Maria, not expecting the extent of our walk, didn't bring a well broken-in pair of shoes and suffered from some blisters.

Once back in Bar Harbor, we were hungry and

Then to the cinema to see the uplifting movie Joker and eat a pizza.

Once back to the hotel, Maria zonked out quickly, I found a friendly bar tender (Harry from Jamaica) and had several night caps.

Thursday, October 17, 2019: StL to Bar Harbor

We got up at 5:00am to get to the airport for our 8:00am flight to Bangor via LaGuardia. All went well until about a half hour before we expected to begin boarding.

That’s when the scheduled departure time started to slide. First by 20 minutes, then 45 minutes, then a hour. We finally boarded and pulled away from the gate about 9:00am. Then we sat on the tarmac for another 30 yminutes. LaGuardia was experiencing delays due to high winds. We finally got into the air and thought we could make our connection to Bangor. The flight out of LaGuardia was to leave at 1:00pm local time. The flight was a bit rough, but we touched down at about 12:30pm. We were in 1st class do we were off the plane quickly. We were in Terminal C and out departing gate was in D. We hustled to the departure gate (we had to go through security again) only to find the plane door had closed just minutes before. The plane was still sitting there, but they would not let us on. So we went to the rebooking desk and spent the next 45 minutes rebooking for a flight from LaGuardia to Bangor via Philadelphia (with a 4 hour layover). Our original flight would have gotten into Bangor at 2:00pm. The rebooked flight has us arriving in Bangor at 11:11pm. With another hour plus drive to Bar Harbor, it will be after midnight. Interestingly, while our primal flight would not wait five minutes for us to arrive, it arrived in Bangor 25 minutes early. Also interestingly, while we missed the flight, our luggage made it and waited six hours in Bangor for us to arrive.