Bar Harbor

Last week, David and I accompanied my parents to Maine, to see my stepfather's family. This is my fourth trip to Bar Harbor. The weather was superb, the family is awesome, the babies are cute (if intermittently inconsolably angry) and the food was great. We did a ton of walking in town. David did some studying, but actually accompanied us on most things. The other times he's been to Maine, he spent most of the time in the hotel, working. He actually got a vacation this time.

I went hiking with my cousins on Thursday to Great Head, a hilltop in Acadia National Park. On the way back, we stopped to see tidal pools, and I saw two birds in the ocean that I'd never seen before. My cousins were amused to see me pull out a field guide and start flipping through it. "What is that? Maybe it's a ... no. What the hell is that? Is it a female...? No. What IS that?" It turned out to be a male surf scoter in breeding plumage. Then I saw a male common eider about 100 feet away. (Birders can guess that I don't do much seashore birding. Those aren't rare birds.) Anyway, that was fun. The next day, we all went hiking on the ocean path at Sand Beach, then up to Cadillac Mountain after lunch. This is my new computer wallpaper:

And this is me squinting in the glare:

Friday night, we all went to dinner at a local lobster place. This is Vivian. She got a Whoopie Pie dessert. "Whoopie!"

It was cool and hardly humid at all in Maine. I was thrilled. We got home on Saturday night, and going outside was liked being slapped with a wet mop. Oh, July in NC. How I did not miss you. Anyway, I was glad to see my dogs, and vice versa, and I spent Sunday quietly, trying to get acclimated. 

I'm hoping to go to water aerobics this afternoon, but it's 3 pm and I just heard thunder. We get a lot of those afternoon thunderstorms in the summer. Maybe they will roll through earlier rather than later. Fingers crossed.