Time for Speedy to get back on the road. Its had another electrical upgrade this time in the form of new AGM Deep-cycle batteries. We should now have enough capacity for at least three days without charging. We've also added a pair of thick wool comforters that we brought back from New Zealand as an underlayment to our bedding. We are hoping to make our rather firm mattresses a bit more comfortable.
We are on a trip to Acadia National Park and to Cobscook Bay State Park for a bit of bicycling, hiking and birding. We left home at about 10am on Thursday and were safely ensconced in campsite A16 at the Seawall Campground in Acadia by 6 PM. It was an uneventful trip up with only a stop for lunch at the Frontier Cafe in Brunswick. Ellen had read about it in a New York Times article and it sounded good, so we gave it a try.
It is in a converted mill complex at the intersection of US 1 and Maine St. in Brunswick and is a combination restaurant and theater for music and movies. I had the chili lunch special with a side of fries and Ellen had a Haddock sandwich with sweet potato fries and an Oxbow dark beer (a local brew). All of the above were very good with the exception of the sweet potato fries, which were a bit soggy. The chili was a soup-of-the-day and was a bit looser than a traditional chili, but the liquid was very spicy without being super-hot and the fries were crisp. The fried haddock was very fresh with a crispy rice-flour based coating.
After lunch it was straight on to Acadia with no stops. We arrived in plenty of time to peruse all of the available sites, choosing one that was set quite far back from the road and open to the sky. It was only after we had set up went for a little walk that we noticed that it backed up to an old cemetery in the woods. We've seen no ghosts as yet, but lots of birds around the campsite and a few deer walking through in the early evening. After our sizable lunch, we had a salad for dinner and called it a day. The comforters did help, but the jury (Ellen) is still out as to whether this is the fix.
Friday morning started clear and sunny and it stayed that way all day. It was in the 40's at sunrise, but warmed fairly quickly. We started the day with a walk out of the campground and across the road to the picnic area and the seashore, stopping to look at birds on the way. The shore at the picnic area is quite rocky with a series of rocks heading out to sea. The tide was fairly low and it was fairly calm. There were quite a few groups of duck float offshore. Most were too far out to identify, but we did make out some eiders close in and a loon.
After our morning stroll it was time to head to the other side of the park and the summit of Cadillac Mountain. There is a hawk watch going on. Volunteers look for hawks migrating Monday through Friday from 9am to 2pm. Hawks use Cadillac Mountain to get a lift as they head south. The heat from the rocky summit causes a rising thermal column and the birds take advantage of it to gain altitude with little effort and then glide on southward along the coast. We saw a couple of dozen hawks come past as we watched from about 10 to noon mostly Sharp-shined Hawks with a few Cooper's Hawks, Harriers, Osprey and a possible Merlin. the watcher volunteers had counted about 70 in total by the time we left.
That was nothing compared to Tuesday when they had a North wind bringing a bulge of birds down from the north. They counted over 3200 hawks that day. The usual average total count for the entire season is only about 3700. That must have been quite the sight. They had big columns of hawks rising in circles over Bar Harbor. The only time we've ever seen anything like that was in Kenya where we saw a huge column of Flamingoes rising over Lake Nakuru.
We had lunch in Speedy while parked at the summit. We spent the afternoon on a short hike along the South Ridge trail going about about a mile down from the summit towards the Blackwoods campground and then back up to the summit. The views were spectacular. It was a clear day and we could out to the islands well offshore, had a good view of Northeast Harbor and of Blue Hill of to the northwest.
After summiting Cadillac Mountain we headed off to Blackwoods Campground via an easier route—using Speedy. We'd only been there once before. It was later in the season and much of the campground was closed. We are hoping to come back to Acadia at the end of the week, after Cobscook, and wanted to see if there we any sites with a bit more sunlight than the one we had last time, deep in the Black woods. It is a huge campground and we were thoroughly perplexed after a tour around some of the loops, so we stopped at the ranger station and asked. They gave us a couple of options that we looked at and we also found a few more sites nearby. We'll probably stop back before we leave for Cobscook and see if we can reserve one of them.
Finally, it was back to the other side of Mount Desert and Seawall Campground for a pasta dinner.
No comments:
Post a Comment