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I have made it back to Boston in one piece. I'm at the end of the week of car hire so I've given the beast of a Chevy back to the hire car people.
I have had a great last few days! I'm glad I saved a day at the start of this leg going into Vermont and I'm glad I chose to spend it at Bar Harbor, Maine - that is the town that is the staging post for Acadia National Park.
I arrived in Bar Harbor and it seemed like a nice quiet town on the drive through to the hostel. I was early and no-one was at the hostel to greet me because it's off season and the lady that runs it has another job. So I wandered around town. That's when I realised that all the hotels and motels in town were closed 'for the season', along with half the shops. There were more tumbleweeds than people.
Fortunately a lovely restaurant/bar called Geddy's was still open. I ate in there each of my three nights in town. My photo will even be on their website (www.geddys.com) in a couple of weeks once they get around to uploading them.
After my experience in Conway, New Hampshire of being the only person in the hostel I was lucky this time around that there was one other guy staying there - Paul from Northern Ireland. He had arrived without a car and had discovered that, along with most things being shut, the local bus connecting the town of Bangor to Bar Harbor only ran on Monday and Friday, restricting his departure, and the local bus service around the park wasn't running so he couldn't get to any of the trailheads.
Fortunately for Paul I had a car so together we tackled Cadillac Mountain on the first day - the highest point on the United States Atlantic Coast (although a paltry 500ish metres high) - and it was a beautiful day. You can see from the photo album that the sky was perfectly blue (so this time I wore my baseball cap to stave off sunburn - see, I'm learning!) and the views were great.
On the second day Paul decided to take it easy (not necessarily connected to the evening's beers consumption in Geddy's the previous night) so I took off on my own and did a few more trails. My favourite was the Beehive which is a 500 foot scramble up basically a cliff face with open ledges and occasional iron rungs embedded into the granite for the trickier sections. I was, to put it politely, mildly terrified on the way up but I was being extra careful with my handholds because, with it being off-season, if I fell there was a good chance no-one else would be along all day to call for help at. I'm glad I challenged myself to do it though.
After the slight chill in the air through most of the last week it was nice to get back to a Boston basking in 72 degree heat (22 degrees Celsius). But now my upper New England adventure is at an end and tomorrow I start what will become my usual routine of getting a bus. I'm going down to Newport, Rhode Island, home of the America's Cup and second home to many rich Americans, whose mansions I shall be touring (legally, I hasten to add). From there I'll be passing through Connecticut - stopping briefly to admire Yale - and into New York City for a few days.
I have to confess that I have supported the evil empire today. Because I have found it surprisingly hard to find internet cafes and because every other building seems to have a free wi-fi hotspot, I went into WalMart in Bangor, Maine on the drive back and bought myself a laptop. I got the cheapest one they had, which is a Compaq Presario F700, and cost a whopping $630 (including tax), which is approximately 320 British pounds. I reasoned that I'd be spending hundreds in internet cafe fees anyway and so many supposedly 'budget travellers' in hostels have laptops so it's not as uncommon as I thought it would be.
So I'm sorry I supported the WalMart neighbourhood-destroyer but I'm on a budget holiday and they're a cheap place. I am otherwise sticking where possible to smaller independent restaurants and shops.
But now I'm off to get some dinner before bed as it's nearly 10pm here. It's been a long day's drive and I grow weary. Thanks to all the people who have posted messages. It's nice to know people are reading this! :-)
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