The Trip - Acadia National Park

We drove the main Loop Road through Acadia National Park today, with perfect early-autumn temperatures, a cool wind, and blue skies. As we do everywhere in New England, we looked for the change of colors and found it more readily in some stretches of road than others.


At the visitor center, my mom went inside and I stayed outside with Scooter, who was not allowed in the building. Tucked away in a wooded area was this fire hydrant (which Scooter did NOT make use of).


And near it was a single stately mushroom (or is it a toadstool? I never know the difference), its cap about four inches across.


We stopped at most of the turnouts, so I could take more photos than I know what to do with. This one had the right combination of water and grasses to attract moose. But there weren't any. I asked a lady there if she had seen any moose, and she hadn't. Not at all on her trip. We haven't either. We should have seen some in Glacier, because we always do, but we didn't this time. And on our drive to Maine, we kept seeing the diamond-shaped warning signs saying "Moose" next however-many miles. But we never saw the promised moose.

Another couple arrived after I did, and we talked. They agreed, too, that this spot should have some moose. And then, because the husband's T-shirt said, "No George W. Bush, No Torture, No...," with a long list of "No" statements I didn't read, I told them I'm conservative and still a nice person. We talked about that a little bit--not about politics but about people and their politics. They said they knew many nice conservatives, and then I told them about a friend-of-a-friend lefty (I didn't use the "L" word) who told me one time, after we'd occasionally argued politics over the course of several months, that he finally believed I wasn't a bad person. The wife asked if I realized that about him, and I didn't say anything for a bit. Then I said that he has blinders and thinks that all of life is politics, but it isn't. There's more to life than that. I never really answered her question. And we never saw any moose (though they had seen one in Nova Scotia last week).


The Loop Road took us close to the water's edge, where I walked out on rocks and photographed them and the tidepools left by the low tide. The water splashed up over seaweed-covered rocks and managed to stay away from me and my camera.


Portions of the coast in Acadia have coarse sandy beaches. Another beach has the rounded blue stones sold at home-improvement stores as "river rocks." But much of the coastline is hard rock reaching out into water that shimmers with sunlight.


At the river rock beach, two large tree trunks, still with some of their roots attached, stretched out on the stones where they lay bleaching in the sun.


I've noticed something since we came to Maine. The state must be along a commercial jet flight corridor. We keep seeing jet trails crossing the sky. The times I flew to Europe and back, the pilots seemed to skirt the North American coast as long as they could before crossing the Atlantic. It's probably safer that way. So these jets that I keep seeing are probably trans-Atlantic flights, people going to England or coming back from Poland or the Czech Republic. And they have no idea what their flight does for the view down here.


Tomorrow we head southwest along the Maine coast.