Maine: Boothbay Harbor

The last Maine post!  So after we finished our hikes (including Beehive Trail) in the morning on our last day in Acadia, we drove towards Boothbay Harbor!  On the way to Boothbay, we stopped in Freeport, Maine at a brewery for lunch!  The brewery was Maine Brewing Company, and OH MY GOSH are they amazing!!  The brewery was seriously SO gorgeous and huuuuuge, and they had a pizza oven that was cooking up some seriously delicious pizzas.  We were starving after our morning of hiking, so we ordered TWO pizzas, and they were seriously some of the best pizzas I've ever had.

The outside of the brewery!

We also ordered a huge flight of beers so we could do a proper tasting!  We shared 8 small beers, and it was SO fun to taste all of their beers!  It was a great way to relax after all of our days in Acadia National Park.

There's the guy making the pizzas!  He was actually from a local bakery, so that pizza dough was AMAZING. 

A cool fountain they had in their table area

Their fridge area with all of their bottles for sale, and you'll notice that 1% For The Planet sign, because they donate 1% of all sales (and they have from the beginning of their brewery) to organizations to help the environment.  Pretty cool, huh? 

The bar area.  This place was so pretty! 

 After we'd tasted some amazing beers and eaten sooooo much pizza, we finished our drive to Boothbay Harbor!  We've been to Boothbay a few times, but never this early in the season!  It was kinda weird how quiet everything was!  We loved it, but the only bummer was that some of the restaurants and stores hadn't opened for the season yet!  We still had an amaaazing time, and we got to explore more of Boothbay than we'd seen before! We stayed there for two nights, and it was awesome.

The view from our seats at the bar of the little restaurant we went to for a lobster roll for Kevin!  The usual lobster roll place that Kevin looooves wasn't open for the season yet, so we had to search for other recommended lobster roll places!  This place was about a 15 minute drive, but it was adorable and the food was great!  I had clam chowder, which was delicious! 

A cute little restaurant called The Tugboat!

Beautiful Boothbay Harbor! 

This was the BnB we stayed at!  It was great, and the breakfasts were SO good.  

We had a GREAT time in Boothbay, and felt really relaxed and refreshed when we drove back to Philly on that Saturday! It was a great trip.  We were happy (as always) to see our Guinness when we got home though, because we definitely missed him like crazy!  I think he slept for like 2 days straight when we got him home.

We're already ready to go back to Maine!!  It's a really beautiful state. 

Acadia National Park - Part 3

Ok, last Acadia post!  

We woke up super early in the morning to go to Cadillac Mountain to watch the sunrise.  We had to set our alarms for like 4am or something (maybe earlier?  I can't remember exactly) because we had to be AT the top of Cadillac mountain by 5am for the sunrise. It was freeeezing cold, but oh my gosh there are no words to explain how beautiful it was.  Oh, and Cadillac Mountain is one of the first spots in the U.S. to see the sunrise!  Isn't that cool?? 

 After watching an amaaazing sunrise, we went into town to have breakfast, and then we went on a few more hikes! One of the hikes was over to Bar Island, because during low tide there's a little bar of land that appears so you can walk over to Bar Island from Bar Harbor!  You just have to keep an eye on the time when you're on the island, because if you stay there too long the tide will rise and you'll have to wait until the next low tide! Craziness.  It was really fun though! 

It's hard to see, but this picture was taken from Bar Island, so you can see the little bar of land over to the left, and across the water is Bar Harbor.  Not the best picture!!

After hiking back from Bar Island, we drove to the trailhead for the Bubble Rock trail.  Bubble Rock is a big ol' boulder that's balanced on the edge of a cliff!  The hike to the trail was pretty lovely.

Handsome McGee!  And that's Bubble Rock! There's more pictures so you can tell how big it is. 

There we go!  Kevin is standing to the right of it.  It's a pretty big boulder! 

Boulder Rock and Kevin again! 

Gorgeous view

 After a few more hikes and some hanging out in Bar Harbor for a bit, we went back to our campsite to hang out for our last night of camping!  We knew we were going to wake up pretty early to do the big Beehive Trail.

Perfection!

 In the morning we packed up all of our sleeping bags, tent, etc and drove to the trailhead for Beehive Trail!  Beehive is a big one, because there are lots of metal ladders and metal bars and stuff that you have to use to pull yourself up parts of the mountain.  We got a nice early start, and it was SO MUCH FUN.  There was only one part where I was like, "Hmm... I don't feel safe and steady right now", but I just needed a few extra seconds to figure out the best way to pull myself up, and then it was fine!  There were amazing views during the WHOLE hike, so that made it really fun too! 

This was like a barbecue grate that you had to walk on... In the next picture you can get a better view of where it was.  

Can you see where the barbecue grate is? This was after I had crossed it.  It's right in the middle of the picture. 

Look at that view! 

Look at that dropoff! 

 That was the end of our Acadia National Park adventures!  After we finished Beehive Trail, we started our drive to Boothbay!  I'll do one last post tomorrow to wrap up our Maine trip!

Acadia National Park - Part 2

I'll just continue along with the Acadia / Bar Harbor portion of our trip!  I'll probably have one more for Acadia, and then another one for Boothbay. 

May 7th: We did lots of little hikes around Acadia, and also drove the whole Park Loop Road!  There is so much breathtaking scenery everywhere you look, so I took approximately one million pictures.

This is Sand Beach!  It's the one sandy beach in Acadia.

This was on our Great Head Trail hike!  We had this whole area to ourselves the whole time.  It was gorgeous! 

When we got back to the parking area after the Great Head Trail, we saw a car that had left their tailgate open, and a seagull was just chilling on it!  It was so funny to see. 

I was surprised that the seagull didn't try to go IN the car!  It just stayed there on the tailgate though.

This area was called Thunder Hole.  At certain times of day, the waves crash into this cave/hole, and it sounds like booming thunder! 

We sat here and watched the waves for quite a while!  The waves were insane because a storm was moving in!  We knew we couldn't stay TOO long though, because we should get back to our campsite to prep for the huge storm that was coming in. 

We put a tarp over our tent to try to protect it from the worst of the rain, and then we hung out under our canopy that we put over our table.  The rain was too hard to get a fire going, so we cooked hotdogs for dinner over our little burner, and then we cooked marshmallows for smores too!  We played a lot of Yahtzee on our picnic table that evening!  

Perfection!  

Ok I'm going to do one more post for Acadia, and then Boothbay!  Get ready for 2 more posts!