More lobster....more luggage!

Hey y'all,

So we're coming into week four of our trip which means only 2 weeks until you see our faces. Are you excited? Huh huh?

So yesterday was our last full day in Bar Harbor. We again let ourselves have a little sleep in, well until 8am at least as the church across the road chimes at 8am each morning and wakes us up which is okay.  We walked to another nearby recommended cafe in the town called Jordan',s it was like an old style diner very cute.  Lovely service also - the waitress also kindly gave us some other walking options in Arcadia National Park as the stupid US Government has shut all national parks, museums and all non essential government offices and services.  So basically they have a lot of really pissed off tourists.  We are lucky though that this all happened after we had been through D.C where we spent a lot of times in museums, monuments and memorials.  However this did stuff up our plans of walking in the National Park yesterday. However as I mentioned the kid waitress gave us some other tips on where we could go walking without having any problems with access and the cops.

We managed to go to a really nice look out and a sand beach which is the only one in the area, we also enjoyed walking around away from all the cruise ship people who think they own the gift shops, foot paths and photo op's as they "only have limited time on shore".  Whatever!  Bar Harbor is great at night (when all the cruise ship people are back on board).

We also walked across to Bar island and up to it's "summit" which wasn't much of a summit but a nice little walk and gave us another view of the bay area.

We also did a modified hour long trolley tour of the town.  We ended up being the only 2 passengers on board (as it was late in the day and all the cruise people had already got back on board).  We learnt about the history of the island and the fire that took out about 16,000 acres (i think sorry book is down in the car and not trekking down there in my jim jams)  in 1947 and lots of the rich and famous holiday homes at the time.  We also learned that Bar Harbor town basically shuts down by 96% the day after the last cruise ship docks and the people that work in the town are mostly seasonal workers not actual locals.  And the town doesn't really open up again until April.

Anyway so for our last meal in Bar Harbor we decided to celebrate this with, you guessed it....lobstah!  Yum yum!  We also learned back in the day that lobsters were feed to prisoners as it was considered hard work and cheap as there were so many of them.  Best fed prisoners if you ask me.  Also another fun fact is that when your about the cook the live lobster they say you pat their tail which puts them to sleep before you put them in the boiling water.  Awww.

This morning we checked out of our cute little hotel and headed south for Portland which is still in Maine.  We arrived here at 1pm but we couldn't check in to our B & B until 3pm so decided to grab some lunch and go find a department store to find another suitcase to put our new purchases in.  Oops more shopping! haha

We found 2 Samsonite suitcases at 50% off in Macy's and of course with us being tourists, they also gave us an extra 10% off.  This ended up being a saving of over $700.  Awesome!  So we have of course repacked our bags and this time managed to get all stuff on the 3 suitcases we have between the 2 of us.  This will also make it easier to leave our bags at the hotel tomorrow in Boston before we return our hire car. Also as we had an old suitcase we now needed to get rid of, the owner said he could take it to the Goodwill place for us when we asked if there was one close by. So nice. Even though B&B's are a little more expensive to stay in, we certainly haven't regretted them as the service has been amazing and you feel very much at home.  We would certainly recommend the two we have stayed at.

So once we finished our shopping including more shoes of course we headed back to check in to the B&B.  It is lovely.  We are of course wishing we had more time here as the man who runs it is lovely, the place it gorgeous and all the finer details have been thought of.  There is complimentary bottles of water in our room already chilling in the fridge, there is a bowl of chocolates on the table, a DVD collection we can help ourselves to while staying here, we are also able to help ourselves to tea and coffee, fresh juice and homemade biscuits as well as bags of chips in the lounge room across the hall from our room.  There are also bags of ice made up for us in the freezer just next door to our room.  There are wine glasses as well as a cork screw etc in each room also.





Tomorrow we head to Boston which we are both really excited about.  We have a slightly early start tomorrow as we need to have the car back in Boston and dropped off by 12 noon and we need to drop the luggage at our hotel first.

Until then, ciao for now!