Tuesday, September 19, 2023

It rained throughout the night with some pretty strong winds at the Schoodic Peninsula campground last night. Needless to say, it wasn’t the best night of sleeping in our RV. It was loud as the rain hit our rooftop and the RV swaying from side to side. Today’s weather in Acadia National Park looks to be warm and sunny though, and I hope that’ll be true! We’ve experienced a lot of rain on this trip. All of our hoses and outside compartments of the RV are wet and nothing seems to dry out with the high humidity of the eastern coast.

Other than the weather, Schoodic Woods Campground was quiet and a great place to stay. Andi and I considered camping here again tonight, but decided to move over to Blackwoods Campground on the other side of Acadia. The national park campgrounds are usually pretty tough to get into, but due to last week’s tropical storm or perhaps the time of year, there are several spots available in every campground which has given us a lot of flexibility in deciding where we want to be.

Blackwoods Campground is located on Mount Desert Island, an hour drive away from Schoodic Campground near Winter Harbor, Maine. Though it’s only 7 miles distance between the two places by water, it takes much longer to drive around the rugged coastline. Blackwoods Campground is the most centrally-located campground in the national park, and close to the town of Bar Harbor, Maine.

Before we left the Schoodic side, we stopped at The Lob Store in Winter Harbor to buy some fresh seafood. Winter Harbor is a working lobster town with lobster boats departing the docks and trucks moving the fresh catch to stores in town. Andi purchased haddock (which is a local white fish) and shrimp for our dinner tonight. We considered buying some lobster, too, but after watching some You Tube videos on how to clean and prepare it, it looked like it would be too much hassle in the RV.

We arrived at Blackwoods Campground around 10:00am, and were able to get into our campsite right away. We parked the RV in our campsite there, unhooked the Jeep, and then drove that to explore the MDI side of the park.

Whenever we visit national parks, we always download an audio driving tour from an app called Guide-Along to listen to while we drive. The commentary is filled with history and information about the park, and automatically plays as you drive the park roads. We drove to an official starting point of the audio tour — Hulls Cove Visitor Center — to begin.

Hulls Cove Visitor Center is the only official visitor’s center in Acadia National Park, and it’s not a big one. We popped in there quickly to check it out, but there wasn’t much to see other than a gift shop. From there, we began on our drive on Park Loop Road.

Acadia National Park has quite a bit of history, thanks to the vision and preservation of two men by the names of George B. Dorr and John D. Rockefeller. There’s a long history of wealthy people from Boston visiting coastal Maine during the summers, and many of these people building “cottages” (aka: mansions) here. Tourism has always been a source of income for the area. Dorr feared the beauty of Acadia would disappear, so he lobbied to gain federal protection for the land and eventually succeeded. Many sections of the Acadia National Park were either purchased or donated following The Great Depression which is why parts of the national park are intermixed with non-park land. As you drive, you’re entering and exiting the park all the time.

Along our drive on Park Loop Road, we stopped at a few look-outs and then at the popular Sand Beach. This beach is large and busy with visitors. This isn’t a great place to swim because the ocean waves are very rough (especially in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Lee), but is still a great place to sit in the sand or play on a sunny day. Tory and Aden loved it here, and started playing right away. Tory, especially, finds her happy place dining and building things in the sand. She always has. This afternoon, she constructed an entire town in the sand which she called Potato Lake. Aden built a dam nearby with some sticks and a piece of wood he found on the beach.

After we successfully tore the kids away from the beach, we continued our drive around Park Loop Road, and then returned to the RV at Blackwoods Campground to get our coats. We made reservations tonight to drive to the top of Cadillac Mountain.

One of the many things that came out of the Covid year 2020 was the requirement for reservations in some of the busier parts of national parks. Driving to the summit of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park is one of those places. In an effort to control the number of people driving to the top of the mountain, park visitors need an advanced reservation. It takes a little planning because the park does not take same-day reservations. Planning during our travels in not our strong suit, so Andi and I probably made three different reservations for different dates and times to drive to the top of the mountain. Today at 6:30pm worked perfectly for us though to catch the sunset. A fun fact is that Cadillac Mountain is the first place in the USA to see the sun rise. If you want to watch the sunrise on Cadillac Mountain, it takes even more planning as those tickets book out immediately and are only released in two weeks increments by the National Park Service.

I’m glad we went back to get warm coats and hot chocolate for the top of Cadillac Mountain because it was cold and windy up there! At 1,530 feet, it’s not the tallest mountain we’ve ever submitted, but it is the highest elevation on the eastern seaboard of the United States.

At the top, we parked our Jeep and walked over to the western side of the mountain. There were several other people gathered there as well waiting for the sun to go down. The four of us found a spot, sipped on our hot drinks, and watched the beauty surrounding us. It wasn’t the most epic sunset, but what was special is that so many people were gathered together to watch the sun set on the day together. Our family recalled many other places we’ve been in the world where we’ve watched the sun set in similar scenarios — on sand dunes in Chile, at the top of Mauna Kea Volcano in Hawaii, and many more.

After sunset, we drove back down the mountain and returned to Blackwoods Campground. Andi, Aden, and I enjoyed the fresh shrimp we bought earlier today for dinner while Tory re-heated some mac & cheese. It gets dark early on the East Coast, so there’s not much to do after the sun goes down. We don’t have great cell or internet connection in Blackwoods Campground either (too many trees for a clear satellite view), so we called it an early night.