Bar Harbor and Ocean Path

Today we decided to get to know Mount Desert Island a little better before focusing on specific activities in specific areas.  We decided to hop the Island Explorer shuttle bus, which passes right in front of our campground.  Our bus's route took us up the Eastern side of our half (the "Quietside" of Mount Desert Island, up through Southwest Harbor, around Somes Sound, and across the Eastern half of Mount Desert Island to the Village Green in Bar Harbor.

We stopped in to purchase our National Parks Pass and got some good hiking suggestions from the park rangers there.  After doing a little touristy walking around Bar Harbor itself, we stopped for a tasty lunch and some local microbrew.  After that, we decided to hop the Loop Bus to take a scenic ride around the Eastern half of Mount Desert Island.  We decided to hop off at Sand Beach and take the Ocean Walk from there to Otter Point.

Sand Beach is very popular with the tourists, and it was quite a mob scene with the beach-goers as well as hikers and other tourists.  We set off on the cliffside path, Southward past the beach, and got a good photo of the great sweep of Sand Beach:

The colors of pink in the granite boulders, yellow in the sand, and richly varied greens in the trees and other vegetation were indescribable.

We continued on along Ocean Walk to Thunder Hole, an inlet in the pink granite cliffs into which the surf thunders and occasionally reverberates so loudly that it sounds like thunder.

The crowds at Thunder Hole were significant, as they had been at Sand Beach, but as we continued along the cliff path beyond Thunder Hole, we left most people behind, and had an isolated walk on to Otter Cliffs and Otter Point.

Otter Point was striking, again, for the large, flat, pink granite boulders.  If one wanted to, one could have almost hopped the boulders all the way down to the edge of the surf.  Occasionally there appeared coves that might have been outlets for streams or landing areas for great waterfalls, in which were deposited thousands of smooth, round, bleached white boulders, contrasting sharply with the squarish, flattish, pink granite boulders around them.

After enjoying Otter Point, we reboarded the Loop Bus to continue our survey of the Eastern half of Mount Desert Island.  We got glimpses of the carriage roads built by John D. Rockefeller and which we anticipate bicycling in the next week or so.  The bus stopped briefly at Jordan Pond, where the Jordan Pond House famously serves its piping hot popovers (again, to be saved for lunch on that bicycle trip).  The bus driver finally let us off at a road intersection where we flagged down yet another Island Explorer bus to make our way back into Bar Harbor.  The buses on the island are notable for being free, hop-on-hop-off, with passengers not limited to hopping on or off at the regular stations - but anywhere along the routes.

Back at the Village Green in Bar Harbor, we finally succumbed to our ice cream fantasies while we waited for our bus.  Curiously, while a casual tourist in Bar Harbor would think that everyone there buys tourist items and eats in restaurants - and when they're not doing either of those things, they're contributing to gridlock in the town by driving around and around - nevertheless, we peeked into some of the trash cans, and we found the truth about what EVERYONE in Bar Harbor does, far in excess of all other activities:

That's right.  The trash cans are full of - and only of - discarded ice cream dishes.  It seems the true secret of Bar Harbor is the ice cream.  Sure enough, we looked carefully around, and all the tourists in the park were eating ice cream.  All the tourists on the benches in front of stores were eating ice cream.  All of the tourists crossing the street were licking ice cream.  In fact, we couldn't find even one person who wasn't partaking of ice cream.  Thank goodness we shared that special experience of Bar Harbor!