Rainy view from Upper Hadlock Pond
17 June 2023
It was our last full day on Mount Desert Island, and there was no hope of doing anything outdoors.
That didn't stop me from my morning balcony photo routine.
When we got back from breakfast, the sky looked to be clearing a little.
For the past several years, I've had a subscription to Acadia Coffee Company. Every month, they mail me two bags of beans. While we were out and about yesterday, I got the usual email notice that the next batch of beans would soon be on its way. I emailed that I was on the island and could save them the postage. They wrote back to say I could pick up my order at Choco-Latte, the coffee shop on the other side of town that the roasters co-own. At 10:00 I received another email that said they'd dropped the beans off.
Now that the rain was merely mist, I set out down the Shore Path towards the southern end of town. The tide was in, leaving Balance Rock in the water.
I walked back through town, stopping in an antique shop to look at some glass for ideas, and picking up a few odds and ends like chocolate covered blueberries.
We poked around for open museums, but nothing we might remotely want to see was open. I suggested to Jack that we drive around the island. There's a road at the northern end that cuts across from Hulls Cove to Town Hill. It's called The Crooked Road, so, naturally, I wanted to take it.
It lives up to its name. It's narrow and tree-lined, and I wondered again what it would be like to live on this island year-round.
We stopped at the Atlantic Brewery, but they didn't have any sour beers. We drove south along the eastern part of the island (it makes sense when you look at a map). As we passed through Somesville, I thought, "I could live here." (I'd already seen that a small ranch house at the western edge of Bar Harbor, within walking distance to everything, but with no view of the water and almost no yard, would run close to $800K; these houses were bigger and the Somes Sound was right there.)
By now it was really raining.
We stopped at a restaurant at the top of Dysart's marina in Southwest Harbor. The food is meh, but the view of the marina is worth it, plus, in 2021, I'd seen my first Araneus diadematus here, in a web at the front window.
We continued our perimeter drive, doing a loop around the Bass Harbor area, then heading up to the eastern side of the island and going south to Seargent Drive, a stretch of road in Acadia that borders the eastern side of Somes Sound. We stopped in a few shops in Northeast Harbor. One was a bookstore that also sold pillows and a few cat beds. I splurged on one because it was made of felted wool balls. I felt sorry for the little guys, losing their brother and then having us disappear on them for ten days, left to fend for themselves against the scary monster who was stopping by daily to feed them.
I was doing all the driving from memory, hoping to circumnavigate the island. Unfortunately, my memory failed me getting out of Northeast Harbor, and we ended up going back the same way we'd come in. (I'd also missed the entire western edge of the island.)
This did give us the chance to pass Upper Hadlock Pond again. I pulled over to get some photos in the rain.
We went back to the hotel. I took some more pictures from the balcony.
We walked to dinner in the rain. This being our last night, we decided we'd get ice cream and take it back to the room. I stood with my cone on the balcony in a drizzle as the light faded over Frenchman Bay.
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