Tuesday: a post in 4 parts

We're loving Maine. And I took entirely too many pictures today.

After sleeping in, doing our bagels-and-coffee thing and catching up on email and the news, we arrived at Acadia around 11:30 this morning. Matt had studied the trails map last night and figured out where we'd go. We ended up getting off course, but it was a fortuitous mistake that took us to the top of the second- or third-highest mountain on the island, with nearly panoramic views. The hike there was also much, much cooler than I was expecting. In most parts it was more like rock climbing than hiking. So much fun!

After we hit that first summit, we realized we were only half a mile to the "big" mountain that we'd intended to climb, so we went there for a Coke and a bathroom break and to refill our water bottles. Then we went down and around the other side of that mountain to get back to our car.

There was definitely one point at which we realized we were no longer on any trail and it was starting to get dark. (As you might be able to tell from the pictures, there wasn't a lot to distinguish the trail from not-the-trail.) I headed one way and Matt headed the other (within sight of each other) and luckily I ran into the trail pretty soon. This would be a much better story if we'd had to spend the night in the woods tonight, but we'd be very, very cold right now if that had happened, so I'm glad it didn't.

We were pretty hungry when we got back because we'd skipped a proper lunch, although we ate plenty of trail food while hiking, so after showers we went to dinner at ... the Thirsty Whale. In our defense, we tried to go to a different restaurant, but it was an hour wait. I think we've now tried everything we want to try on the Thirsty Whale's menu, so tomorrow we'll be branching out. Probably.

As I said, I took tons of pictures today, so in the interest of keeping these posts a decently moderate length I'm going to divide the pictures into categories and post them in three separate posts. Coming right up ...