2023 Summer Road Trip – Day 11, Acadia National Park Day 1

Saturday, July 15, 2023

After completing our lighthouse road trip yesterday, we arrived at Hadley’s Point RV park in Bar Harbor Maine. Great, family-oriented campground with friendly, helpful staff. This is our third RV park of the trip. We plan to stay here until Tuesday, visiting Acadia National Park and the surrounding area and doing some laundry since they have some nice new machines.

After a good night of rest in this quiet campground, we elected to use the Island Explorer bus system for our first day of visiting Acadia. The bus system is entirely free and you can visit everything in the park and go into Bar Harbor just by changing buses depending on what you want to see. We began as we usually do by visiting the National Park Visitor Center. You do have to have a park pass to enter the park but our lifetime geezer pass took care of that for us. The visitor center is very nice and we remembered to get our NP passport stamped while we were there. Then we changed to the park loop bus and headed into the park. It was a foggy morning and more so in the park. We exited the bus at Sand Beach and the trail head for Great Head Loop Trail. We were surprised after seeing all the cliffs and rocks at the lighthouses yesterday that there was sand at the beach. It was a very different and more course sand than the beautiful white Alabama gulf coast beaches. The trail had many look out points and we stopped at most of them. The trail had lots of roots and rocks, sort of like the Smokey Mountains and a lot of Alabama. It also had big beautiful ferns and flowers. As the day progressed the fog burned off and we had a little sunshine. At the end of the trail we had to do a little rock scrambling but overall it was a very nice trail to begin our exploration of Acadia.

After reading about parking issues in the park we think the free bus system is a good option.

Sand Beach, where our hike started. (There were actually a bunch of people there but we erased most of them from this picture.)

We are very familiar with rocks-and-roots trails.

We walked down towards the water from the trail a couple of times.

At some of the overlooks we could barely see the ocean below.

Part of the hike required some rock scrambling.

Our hike statistics. You can tell we did a lot of stopping and looking.

From there we hiked Ocean Path Trail to Thunder Hole, about ¾ mile. There was another gift shop at Thunder Hole so we were able to get another NP stamp for our book. Thunder Hole is a natural rock inlet where waves crash with a loud boom and high-flying water and foam. It was a fun little stop and then we boarded another bus for a trip to Bar Harbor.

The fog started to lift after we finished our first hike and started towards Thunder Hole. The hill above the fog is where the earlier trail is.

Thunder hole is easily accessed from the Loop Road so it was much more crowded than the trail we hiked.

The waves were not that impressive at low tide

Someone let an umbrella get away into the hole.

Bar Harbor was a busy place today. People crowded the streets, shopping in all the little shops. It was very touristy and reminded us of Gatlinburg. We did have a good lunch of fish and chips at one of the local restaurants and enjoyed wondering around the harbor and admiring some beautiful boats/yachts. Of course we also tried some delicious local wild blueberry soft serve ice cream. Another bus returned us to our campground just in time for the rain to begin. It didn’t last long though and then we and some more sunshine. It was another wonderful day. Hope you are having a great weekend. Shine your light!