Acadia National Park, Maine: Day Five

Activities: La Rochelle Mansion and Museum, Dorr Museum of Natural History
Date: September 22, 2022

We knew that the weather forecast was for rain all day but it hadn’t started yet so Mattix and I wanted to get an outdoor adventure in before the rain. We hadn’t had the canoe out on the cove yet so we drug it to the shore and dropped it in. We paddled around for a bit before we let the wind blow us back in. It was a thick mist in the air and the strong wind made it uncomfortable and difficult to make any good headway in the canoe. Mama was in the lower cabin, keeping warm and out of the rain, watching us while she read a bit and drank her coffee. Charlie was still in bed in the main cabin sawing logs (snoring away).

For breakfast, Jill and I cooked up some eggs and put them on an English muffin and the kids had cereal. We checked out things we could do on a rainy day in the area while we ate and landed on some museums in Bar Harbor. We grabbed our rain jackets and started to head out the door.

I was taking some snacks and supplies to our rented Jeep when I realized that we had a problem. We had left the sunroof open and it was down pouring rain. I closed the roof and ran back inside. I stripped down to my shorts and my rain jacket, grabbed 4 towels and went to work wiping everything down as good as I could, blotting and dabbing like a mad man.

I was able to get it pretty dry but the driver and front passenger seat was still damp and the floor mats were soaked. Good thing the next day brought gale winds with no rain. We were able to leave the Jeep open and set the mats by the fireplace in the cabin and got things pretty dry before we had to return it later that week.

Our first museum was the El Rochelle Mansion and Museum. It was a 100+ year old mansion that was fairly original and had lots of cool old artifacts and stories of the Bar Harbor area. We followed that up with the Dorr Museum of Natural History, a nice museum with real stuffed animals, some cool art work, and bones of huge marine animals.

Our next stop was the Thirsty Whale for a drink and some appetizers of fried clams and mozzarella sticks. The fried clams were okay, but they aren’t something I feel I need to integrate into my favorite foods or anything. Fogtown Brewery was across the street and it was still raining, so we stopped over there to sample some beers. The kids got restless so they went shopping for a bit while we finished our drinks and shared a table with a nice couple from New Jersey and chatted about things we liked about Acadia and what things are like in our neck of the U.S.

For dinner, we slid over to Rosalie’s for some pizza. The kids got half pepperoni and have pepperoni and sausage and Jill and I got the Pizza ala Napoletano. We thought it was amazingly good and were psyched to have some leftovers that we could take for lunch the next day. It was still raining once we filled up on pizza, so we headed back to the cabin and watched Thursday Night Football until we went to bed.