Maine 2024 Day 1: Portland Bar Harbor

Portland Head Light

12 June 2024

We left home late morning and made good time driving north on Memorial Day. Our go-to hotel is still affordable at this time of year (not so much in mid-August, when the price nearly triples). Jack always picks the restaurants and makes reservations. As usual, I never remember the names. This one was on the bay side, down the hill a bit from the art museum. 

If New York is the "City that Never Sleeps," Portland is the "City that Sleeps In." Nothing much opens until 11:00 a.m., and even that is a mere suggestion. After finding a bookstore Jack wanted to visit was still closed, we drove south to the Portland Head lighthouse.

It was shrouded in fog, which, to me, is the absolute best time for pictures.

I took a short video of waves on the rocks.

There's a path along the coast. We went south first.

Then we turned back towards the lighthouse.

I took several pictures looking straight up from the bottom. I'm sure Blogger will freak out if I actually post them. Use your imagination.

We went north. Nursing a knee injury, Jack went as far as the first decline. I wandered farther north on my own.

The fog began to lift.

After that, we drove back into town to get to another book store, one that had decided to be open. We were halfway up Munjoy Hill anyway, so we found a parking spot (!) at the top. The food trucks that had been up here in previous years were now down by the water.

We drove to Freeport because Wilbur's of Maine makes the best chocolate-covered cranberries and I had to get loads of them. We ate lunch at a restaurant across the street and then made our way to Bar Harbor.

Every other time we've stayed at the Bar Harbor Inn, we've chosen the second floor with an ocean view. This time, we decided to try a room on the ground floor, which turned out to be better for Jack's knee and easier for wheeling my bike in and out of the room.

What we hadn't planned on were the back-to-back January storms that took out the Shore Path. I happened to be at work the day one of the storms hit, and, as usual, had the Bar Harbor Cam running on my second monitor. Watching the giant waves, I screen-grabbed the video. I didn't know at the time about the damage the storms caused, not only on the Shore Path, but inside Acadia National Park and along a road in Seawall as well (the road no longer exists).

The pier, center, was eventually under two feet of water. In these photos, the water is already several feet higher than it usually gets at high tide.

The Shore Path is about half a mile long, running south from the town pier along the side of Frenchman Bay. It turns west and dumps out on a side street at the other end of town. Each section is the responsibility of the landowner the path cuts through. The Bar Harbor Inn is the biggest of those, and the Inn got to work on the restoration right away. Here's a screen grab from an article in the Mount Desert Islander showing the earliest stages of the repair between the pier and the Inn:

Here's another screen grab of the storm at Seal Harbor:

At the Inn, the contractors had to build a road where the lawn used to be so that they could get their equipment in. Here's an Islander photo from later in the winter. While this was happening, the Inn was getting its own facelift.

And this is what's left of the road at Seawall (another Mount Desert Islander screen grab).

This section of road is owned by Acadia National Park because it runs through the park. The road was repaired, got washed out, was repaired a second time, got washed out again, and now there's a raging debate about whether or not to bother rebuilding it. (All I can think of is this.)

Welcome to the new normal.

So, having chosen a ground-floor room long before the storms hit, we now had a front-row seat to the reconstruction effort. The ground floor rooms are elevated on the shore side and ground-level at the entrance.

These are supports for the eventual sea wall cement. The stones in front of it are where the path will be.

We got a bit of late afternoon fog.

The Margaret Todd was away from her dock, moored in the harbor. There must have been some bad weather before we got here.

Sheep Porcupine Island:

Bald Porcupine Island:

I always have to check in on the dying trees on the harbor side of Sheep Porcupine.

We walked across town to what has become our first-night ritual: dinner at McKay's, where they always have some iteration of Allagash coolship sour beer (click here to go down a rabbit hole about how they do this), the only beer I like. 

To the south, fog shrouded Champlain (I think?) Mountain.

We hadn't planned for the sunset, and it had been cloudy anyway. The sky started to clear, so I pulled up Bar Harbor Cam's west view on my phone to see if we were missing anything. Dang.

Fortunately, there was still a little of it left by the time we were finished dinner and had walked down towards the pier. A low bank of clouds hung over the horizon.

The clouds were moving fast enough for a short video:

Someone had been creative with chalk on the side of a dumpster on the pier: "If you don't care about zooplankton," it read, "You don't care about America." It was signed, "the Copepod Queen." Shout out to all my grad school peeps. If you know, you know.

There was still some low fog to the east:

We got ice cream, as we always do, at one of the four shops in town.

On the way back to our room, we found, under the knee-high pathway lights, the telltale webs of Zygiella x-notata, the "missing sector spider." Ziggies! We don't get these back home.

I grabbed my good camera out of the car and got to work. Unfortunately, the lamp light messed with the color balance, yellowing everything.

We also had some unidentifiable youngsters on the deck. Their orb webs were complete. Very young Ziggies can make complete webs too, but at this age, the best even the folks at iNaturalist can say about these spiders is that they're some sort of orb weaver. Juvenile patterning can vary vastly from the adult colors; spiders molt 8-12 times before adulthood. Maybe they're also Ziggies (the dorsal pattern suggests it), or perhaps they're the other dominant orb weaver up here, Araneus diadematus. From previous years, I new that these, unlike the Ziggies, would sit on their webs during the day too. Unless I rent an oceanside room for an entire summer, I'll never know. The first floor rooms being elevated as they are, I wouldn't be able to photograph them even as an interloper on the Shore Path.

I set my alarm for 4:40 a.m. to catch the sunrise.