OMG photoriffic #2
Jul. 31st, 2008 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reymonkeyPart two of the trip to Maine, which was really only the last two days, but more exciting than the family reunion stuff. We finally got to the place we'd all been waiting for.
We left Bangor in the morning and reached Bar Harbor in a couple hours, still too early to check into the hotel. We'd been told by other family people who'd been down to Bar Harbor before the reunion about 'this one lobster place that's really good and it's somewhere between this town and this town and the name starts with Th'. Brilliant directions, really. Having not the faintest clue what to look for, we managed to stumble on it by sheer luck and random detours. The name was Thurston's. The t-shirts said 'Thurston for lobster', Harhar.
That's not the best ever pieced together view, but there you have it. The yellow roofed part to the right is where you sit to eat, and it's just mesh screen for the walls so the breeze blows through. It was well worth the stumbling around. I had my first lobster roll, a salad, and then there was some sharing of the most amazing blueberry ice cream ever. We're not sure how they fit the ice cream in with that much blueberry.
We went on to the Bass Harbor lighthouse, because that sounded interesting, and we were on this loop of the other leg of the island that our hotel wasn't on. Beautiful views, going up to the lighthouse itself was okay, but the better part was the rocks near it. The rocks themselves were easy to clamber around on, lots of steps cut and set into them, but some people didn't brave the wooden steps to climb down to that point, because honestly those were steeper and more tiring. We passed a lot of people just resting at the top or halfway down who asked us if it was worth it.
The zoom on my camera is pretty good, we weren't really all that close up. Beautiful view though.
Completing the loop, we went down the other leg of the island to Bar Harbor and looked for the hotel. We looked for the hotel a lot. We also passed a house with a five foot long metal dragon sculpture out front that was amazingly awesome but I never got a picture of. Boo Rey. After some flailing and backtracking we managed to hit the Main street and into tourist central, which our hotel was practically the center of. If you ever get the chance to stay at the Bar Harbor Inn I recommend it. Assuming, of course, you can actually afford it. Did I mention this trip would not have happened if I knew I was going to lose my job? I should've taken photos of the room, it wasn't huge but it was very elegant and we were on the second story looking out over the water. We immediately began snapping photos from the balcony.
That's the far end of the hotel curving around on the right, and Bridgie, and an arm...
I was excited about the boats I could see, and started trying to get some shots, and discovered the zoom on my camera is way better than I realized. This is still from the balcony. I wanted photos of the trawlers for future art reference, and I was enchanted by this schooner with red sails...
In case you can't tell, that is the schooner coming out from behind the little island there. I had no idea my camera had that good a zoom, even if it is partly a digital zoom.
Some resting happened, but... ocean! Who can sleep when there's ocean!?! The beach exploration was a little disappointing, as it became clear that not only was it close to high tide, but the way our limited time was scheduled it would be very hard to find a chance to explore the beach at low tide. Still, there was some scrambling around on the rocks. This is taken from the beach pretty close to in front of the hotel room, but I got out as far as that distant point of rock, the furthest one you can see here. There was also a gravel path along the beach edge, above the tide wall.
Some freaks, given a camera, will photograph anything.
This stick looked like the remains of a tree growing next to the rock, but apparently the tide or a person had just wedged it there, because two minutes later the rising tide knocked it down. There was also this amazing boulder, which we later found painted on the trail signs. People kept climbing up to sit on it or push on it, but the trail sign makes it sound like it's been there since the late 1800's, so I don't think it's going anywhere.
We had dinner reservations to dress up and be on time for, which curtailed the whole beach exploring thing. The hotel restaurant was very fancy, with amaziing steaks and little egg cups of some sherbert thing between appetizers and the main course and they didn't card me when I ordered coffee with booze in it after dinner. I don't even remember what was in it, kahlua and some liquers, very good stuff.
Sleeping was hard, but after listening to the entirety of Sting's Soul Cages album while sitting out on the balcony, even the insomniacs caught a few hours with the balcony door left open for the sound of the waves.
We tried to get up early the next morning for a glimpse of the beach, some of us more successfully than others. We miscalculated dawn by about an hour, so it was getting brighter fast, but there was still fog hanging around, and nobody else on the beach.
Looking back at the hotel. Our room is somewhere a couple to the left of where the building bends.
The schooner from before, the Margaret Todd, was an option to go sail on. Unfortunately we had to choose between that and the whale watching tour, and whale watching tour won out. I'm not sorry, although I wish we could have gone on both. We didn't make reservations and should have, because we just slipped in, making it one person over the usual limit. Here we have the hotel and the amazingly touristy town of Bar Harbor from the boat as it moves out of port. It was a fair-sized boat with three levels and a little galley (read: place where they sell cocoa, junk food, and distribute seasick bags).
We motored out past an island with a lighthouse, and learned that many of the lighthouses are unmanned and automated, running off solar power. This one was, but there were bird researchers on the island, counting puffin population. I zoomed in a lot but never did get a decent photo of the puffins. Trust me, they're in there somewhere.
The whole trip there was an oceanography intern chick who talked to the whole boat via loudspeakers, from the top deck. While we were hanging out here we talked to one of the bird researchers on the island by radio, with the woman on the boat relaying questions from passengers on the top deck. That was pretty cool, although we never bothered to go up top ourselves.
We motored away and out to more open ocean, and OMG I have never seen so many people seasick in my life. There was so much barfing. We think one person lost it and then there was some kind of chain reaction. Bridgie's mother got sick too. Yagh. We felt bad for that, but she insisted she was okay. For a while there everywhere you looked there was somebody puking into a bag, but apparently this is normal because they had fifty million seasick bags on hand and all the crew had plastic gloves on hand and seemed experienced in dealing with it.
My dad used to have a boat. I like boats. I got a little queasy when we did some spinning around sideways and were manuevering into our own wake, but... just wow. They should warn people at the ticket desk.
There were lots of seabirds, lots of harbor seals who bobbed around staring back at the tourists, looking bemused. At one point we startled four dolphins who leaped away from the boat from very close, and it happened too suddenly to get a picture. Also I had a low battery warning and was trying to be careful. And then... whales.
Of all the whales we could potentially see, humpbacks were exactly what I'd hoped for. They've always been my favorite.
They kept turning the boat to keep the whales to one side or the other so people could see, but which side they were on kept switching, so you had everyone running from one side of the boat to the other as a group. After some good tail views they identified the whales as a female named Spar, a calf with her that was roughly six months old (they don't name the calves until they're a year old and leave their mothers), and a presumably male escort named Breakers. They assume Breakers is male because they've never seen him with a calf, and this calf clearly belonged to Spar. The woman told us stuff about when these whales had first and most recently been spotted, and talked about ID by tail markings and so on.
That's the calf on the far left I think, Spar in the middle, Breakers on the right.
I think this tail belongs to Breakers...
I wish my camera battery hadn't been going, or I would have taken more shots instead of trying to wait for just the perfect ones. I never did get one of the underside fluke markings.
It was past one by the time we got back, and Bridgie's mother was recovered enough that we all had lunch. Lunchtime was also low tide, and there was a quick run to the beach, a run back up to get the damn camera after finding a starfish, a run back down to the beach, a run back up to the hotel room so as not to keep other people waiting, only to find napping happening. Damnit. That's more time that could have been spent on the beach! But hey, pink starfish!
Snails were everywhere. In Washington, Mussels are all over the rocks like this, but here it was snails everywhere. You'd find crevices where it was just a solid pile of snails. This was the underside of a rock.
You can get a better view of the boulder at low tide, too.
Bridgie's dad was excited to go to a place called Cadillac Mountain, which is supposed to be the highest spot around and an amazing view. He forgot his camera, and realized when we were already halfway there. Then we got to it, started to climb up, and a solid wall of fog rolled in faster than we could walk the remaining 20 feet or so to the top.
Roughly the same view less than a minute later.
But hey, fog makes for some nice artistic shots?
We went to a gift shop by the parking lot and hung around, but so did the fog, so we gave it up and drove back down to lower bits of Acadia park. There was a spot called Bubble Pond, so called, I guess, because of the two 'bubble' hills in the background. I have a dirty mind. I see two perfectly rounded same size hills beside each other and bubbles are not what comes to mind.
There were signs around that no swimming or playing in the pond is allowed because it's a drinking water source. It was amazingly clear water, just beautiful.
We took a little wooded trail with an informational pamhplet that we took turns reading aloud, drove on and stopped at a little sandy beach where a family got me to take pictures of them with their camera, careful to keep the kid's sand garden in the shot. Then we moved on to a spot we were hunting down called Thunder Hole. It was hitting high tide by then, which was probably exactly the right time to visit it. The walk down had lots of guardrails and there were a lot of people. I'm assuming the actual Thunder Hole is the spot to the right, where the water crashes in and makes a good roar.
It wasn't full high tide yet, but coming in, and the crashing waves were damn impressive. The railings were good and high and strong, there might even have been a park guard around, I'm not sure.
Heading back to Bar Harbor, we had a night out on the town, which only lasted as long as our energy did. First stop was the whale museum, which it occurs to me just now I should have taken photos in. They had two whole immature whale skeletons. We ate at a place right next to the whale watch tour dock, open air, and I took an obligatory shot of this:
I also took some completely unintentional video because I hit the button on accident. I won't burden you with it, since it involves the camera moving all the hell over the place with some audio of me wondering why the hell it won't take the picture. The place had something called 'the Lobster experience', which was more like a Maine experience. Clam chowder, followed by a big metal pot with a whole lobster, clams in the shell, potatoes, corn, then blueberry pie for dessert. Yikes. I stuck with the fish and chips, but opted for the sweet potato fries, and it was the best damn battered fish I have ever had in my life. The tartar sauce was too sweet but the rest was amazing. While we were eating we watched another wall of fog roll in, and it stayed right through when we left the next morning.
After dinner we wandered a little and I took some photos in the dark of stuff that didn't really turn out. We also discovered that the entire place is really aimed at tourists. Every place that wasn't a restaurant or bar or ice cream shop was some form of gift or jewelry shop, all designed to suck you in and take your money. I did my best to resist.
The next morning we had to be up early enough that we really caught the dawn, through the fog still sitting there from the night before.
As we were finishing packing up, we got a visitor hoping for a handout.
A last shot off the balcony (I chased the gull away), and we checked out and were on our way.
The trip home was fine, except for getting stuck in a turnaround spot next to the runway on the last leg of the flights, waiting while they replotted a course and got clearance due to funky weather around Richmond. We're not appreciating the return to the heat, either. It's a vacation we won't forget for a while, and it was so good to be next to the ocean again. I hope someday to live on the coast again, but maybe a little further south, like Mass.
Uhhh... yeah. I'm still trying to retrieve my brain, really dizzy today, and it's grey and cloudy out. I might be getting hit with the sinus fun of a weather system moving in. Squeaks is asking to go out again so she can kill more stuff...
Hopefully the next post will be some artstuff.
We left Bangor in the morning and reached Bar Harbor in a couple hours, still too early to check into the hotel. We'd been told by other family people who'd been down to Bar Harbor before the reunion about 'this one lobster place that's really good and it's somewhere between this town and this town and the name starts with Th'. Brilliant directions, really. Having not the faintest clue what to look for, we managed to stumble on it by sheer luck and random detours. The name was Thurston's. The t-shirts said 'Thurston for lobster', Harhar.
That's not the best ever pieced together view, but there you have it. The yellow roofed part to the right is where you sit to eat, and it's just mesh screen for the walls so the breeze blows through. It was well worth the stumbling around. I had my first lobster roll, a salad, and then there was some sharing of the most amazing blueberry ice cream ever. We're not sure how they fit the ice cream in with that much blueberry.
We went on to the Bass Harbor lighthouse, because that sounded interesting, and we were on this loop of the other leg of the island that our hotel wasn't on. Beautiful views, going up to the lighthouse itself was okay, but the better part was the rocks near it. The rocks themselves were easy to clamber around on, lots of steps cut and set into them, but some people didn't brave the wooden steps to climb down to that point, because honestly those were steeper and more tiring. We passed a lot of people just resting at the top or halfway down who asked us if it was worth it.
The zoom on my camera is pretty good, we weren't really all that close up. Beautiful view though.
Completing the loop, we went down the other leg of the island to Bar Harbor and looked for the hotel. We looked for the hotel a lot. We also passed a house with a five foot long metal dragon sculpture out front that was amazingly awesome but I never got a picture of. Boo Rey. After some flailing and backtracking we managed to hit the Main street and into tourist central, which our hotel was practically the center of. If you ever get the chance to stay at the Bar Harbor Inn I recommend it. Assuming, of course, you can actually afford it. Did I mention this trip would not have happened if I knew I was going to lose my job? I should've taken photos of the room, it wasn't huge but it was very elegant and we were on the second story looking out over the water. We immediately began snapping photos from the balcony.
That's the far end of the hotel curving around on the right, and Bridgie, and an arm...
I was excited about the boats I could see, and started trying to get some shots, and discovered the zoom on my camera is way better than I realized. This is still from the balcony. I wanted photos of the trawlers for future art reference, and I was enchanted by this schooner with red sails...
In case you can't tell, that is the schooner coming out from behind the little island there. I had no idea my camera had that good a zoom, even if it is partly a digital zoom.
Some resting happened, but... ocean! Who can sleep when there's ocean!?! The beach exploration was a little disappointing, as it became clear that not only was it close to high tide, but the way our limited time was scheduled it would be very hard to find a chance to explore the beach at low tide. Still, there was some scrambling around on the rocks. This is taken from the beach pretty close to in front of the hotel room, but I got out as far as that distant point of rock, the furthest one you can see here. There was also a gravel path along the beach edge, above the tide wall.
Some freaks, given a camera, will photograph anything.
This stick looked like the remains of a tree growing next to the rock, but apparently the tide or a person had just wedged it there, because two minutes later the rising tide knocked it down. There was also this amazing boulder, which we later found painted on the trail signs. People kept climbing up to sit on it or push on it, but the trail sign makes it sound like it's been there since the late 1800's, so I don't think it's going anywhere.
We had dinner reservations to dress up and be on time for, which curtailed the whole beach exploring thing. The hotel restaurant was very fancy, with amaziing steaks and little egg cups of some sherbert thing between appetizers and the main course and they didn't card me when I ordered coffee with booze in it after dinner. I don't even remember what was in it, kahlua and some liquers, very good stuff.
Sleeping was hard, but after listening to the entirety of Sting's Soul Cages album while sitting out on the balcony, even the insomniacs caught a few hours with the balcony door left open for the sound of the waves.
We tried to get up early the next morning for a glimpse of the beach, some of us more successfully than others. We miscalculated dawn by about an hour, so it was getting brighter fast, but there was still fog hanging around, and nobody else on the beach.
Looking back at the hotel. Our room is somewhere a couple to the left of where the building bends.
The schooner from before, the Margaret Todd, was an option to go sail on. Unfortunately we had to choose between that and the whale watching tour, and whale watching tour won out. I'm not sorry, although I wish we could have gone on both. We didn't make reservations and should have, because we just slipped in, making it one person over the usual limit. Here we have the hotel and the amazingly touristy town of Bar Harbor from the boat as it moves out of port. It was a fair-sized boat with three levels and a little galley (read: place where they sell cocoa, junk food, and distribute seasick bags).
We motored out past an island with a lighthouse, and learned that many of the lighthouses are unmanned and automated, running off solar power. This one was, but there were bird researchers on the island, counting puffin population. I zoomed in a lot but never did get a decent photo of the puffins. Trust me, they're in there somewhere.
The whole trip there was an oceanography intern chick who talked to the whole boat via loudspeakers, from the top deck. While we were hanging out here we talked to one of the bird researchers on the island by radio, with the woman on the boat relaying questions from passengers on the top deck. That was pretty cool, although we never bothered to go up top ourselves.
We motored away and out to more open ocean, and OMG I have never seen so many people seasick in my life. There was so much barfing. We think one person lost it and then there was some kind of chain reaction. Bridgie's mother got sick too. Yagh. We felt bad for that, but she insisted she was okay. For a while there everywhere you looked there was somebody puking into a bag, but apparently this is normal because they had fifty million seasick bags on hand and all the crew had plastic gloves on hand and seemed experienced in dealing with it.
My dad used to have a boat. I like boats. I got a little queasy when we did some spinning around sideways and were manuevering into our own wake, but... just wow. They should warn people at the ticket desk.
There were lots of seabirds, lots of harbor seals who bobbed around staring back at the tourists, looking bemused. At one point we startled four dolphins who leaped away from the boat from very close, and it happened too suddenly to get a picture. Also I had a low battery warning and was trying to be careful. And then... whales.
Of all the whales we could potentially see, humpbacks were exactly what I'd hoped for. They've always been my favorite.
They kept turning the boat to keep the whales to one side or the other so people could see, but which side they were on kept switching, so you had everyone running from one side of the boat to the other as a group. After some good tail views they identified the whales as a female named Spar, a calf with her that was roughly six months old (they don't name the calves until they're a year old and leave their mothers), and a presumably male escort named Breakers. They assume Breakers is male because they've never seen him with a calf, and this calf clearly belonged to Spar. The woman told us stuff about when these whales had first and most recently been spotted, and talked about ID by tail markings and so on.
That's the calf on the far left I think, Spar in the middle, Breakers on the right.
I think this tail belongs to Breakers...
I wish my camera battery hadn't been going, or I would have taken more shots instead of trying to wait for just the perfect ones. I never did get one of the underside fluke markings.
It was past one by the time we got back, and Bridgie's mother was recovered enough that we all had lunch. Lunchtime was also low tide, and there was a quick run to the beach, a run back up to get the damn camera after finding a starfish, a run back down to the beach, a run back up to the hotel room so as not to keep other people waiting, only to find napping happening. Damnit. That's more time that could have been spent on the beach! But hey, pink starfish!
Snails were everywhere. In Washington, Mussels are all over the rocks like this, but here it was snails everywhere. You'd find crevices where it was just a solid pile of snails. This was the underside of a rock.
You can get a better view of the boulder at low tide, too.
Bridgie's dad was excited to go to a place called Cadillac Mountain, which is supposed to be the highest spot around and an amazing view. He forgot his camera, and realized when we were already halfway there. Then we got to it, started to climb up, and a solid wall of fog rolled in faster than we could walk the remaining 20 feet or so to the top.
Roughly the same view less than a minute later.
But hey, fog makes for some nice artistic shots?
We went to a gift shop by the parking lot and hung around, but so did the fog, so we gave it up and drove back down to lower bits of Acadia park. There was a spot called Bubble Pond, so called, I guess, because of the two 'bubble' hills in the background. I have a dirty mind. I see two perfectly rounded same size hills beside each other and bubbles are not what comes to mind.
There were signs around that no swimming or playing in the pond is allowed because it's a drinking water source. It was amazingly clear water, just beautiful.
We took a little wooded trail with an informational pamhplet that we took turns reading aloud, drove on and stopped at a little sandy beach where a family got me to take pictures of them with their camera, careful to keep the kid's sand garden in the shot. Then we moved on to a spot we were hunting down called Thunder Hole. It was hitting high tide by then, which was probably exactly the right time to visit it. The walk down had lots of guardrails and there were a lot of people. I'm assuming the actual Thunder Hole is the spot to the right, where the water crashes in and makes a good roar.
It wasn't full high tide yet, but coming in, and the crashing waves were damn impressive. The railings were good and high and strong, there might even have been a park guard around, I'm not sure.
Heading back to Bar Harbor, we had a night out on the town, which only lasted as long as our energy did. First stop was the whale museum, which it occurs to me just now I should have taken photos in. They had two whole immature whale skeletons. We ate at a place right next to the whale watch tour dock, open air, and I took an obligatory shot of this:
I also took some completely unintentional video because I hit the button on accident. I won't burden you with it, since it involves the camera moving all the hell over the place with some audio of me wondering why the hell it won't take the picture. The place had something called 'the Lobster experience', which was more like a Maine experience. Clam chowder, followed by a big metal pot with a whole lobster, clams in the shell, potatoes, corn, then blueberry pie for dessert. Yikes. I stuck with the fish and chips, but opted for the sweet potato fries, and it was the best damn battered fish I have ever had in my life. The tartar sauce was too sweet but the rest was amazing. While we were eating we watched another wall of fog roll in, and it stayed right through when we left the next morning.
After dinner we wandered a little and I took some photos in the dark of stuff that didn't really turn out. We also discovered that the entire place is really aimed at tourists. Every place that wasn't a restaurant or bar or ice cream shop was some form of gift or jewelry shop, all designed to suck you in and take your money. I did my best to resist.
The next morning we had to be up early enough that we really caught the dawn, through the fog still sitting there from the night before.
As we were finishing packing up, we got a visitor hoping for a handout.
A last shot off the balcony (I chased the gull away), and we checked out and were on our way.
The trip home was fine, except for getting stuck in a turnaround spot next to the runway on the last leg of the flights, waiting while they replotted a course and got clearance due to funky weather around Richmond. We're not appreciating the return to the heat, either. It's a vacation we won't forget for a while, and it was so good to be next to the ocean again. I hope someday to live on the coast again, but maybe a little further south, like Mass.
Uhhh... yeah. I'm still trying to retrieve my brain, really dizzy today, and it's grey and cloudy out. I might be getting hit with the sinus fun of a weather system moving in. Squeaks is asking to go out again so she can kill more stuff...
Hopefully the next post will be some artstuff.
