We woke up to fog this morning. The plan was to leave the boat by 6:45am and dinghy over to the town dock and then walk about a quarter of a mile to the Island Explorer bus stop by the Southwest Harbor Post Office. It’s the only day we had to take the grandkids hiking on Mount Desert Island. We decided to go with the plan anyhow. By the time the bus got to Bar Harbor the fog was gone and all looked good. We went out for a nice breakfast and then took another bus to Sand Beach. We were going to do the Bee Hive Trail. I wasn’t so sure about the trail. The description said it was steep and had iron rungs to help you climb up the mountain. I was counting on at least one of the kids to refuse to do it. Well Emilia and Sam are braver than me, no refusals occurred, even though the trail climbs the rock face of the mountain in the picture above. That is not us on the mountain but it gives you an idea of the trail we followed. We were very lucky. The views were clear until we got up to the summit of 520 feet and then the fog came back. We all agreed that the hike up was just a bit beyond our comfort level but we were glad that we did it. We were also all happy that we weren’t taking the same route down. We took The Bowl Trail down. “The Bowl” was a very cool lake that a number of people told us was full of leeches!

After we finished on the mountain we went to check out Sand Beach, which is the only sand beach on Mount Desert Island. Our plan was to take the Ocean Path trail for a couple more miles. It was really a nothing trail that just went next to the road along the ocean. The views were nice but the walk was not at all challenging. It really started to rain as we were walking though and we jumped on the first bus that came by to go back to Bar Harbor. We found a pizza parlor for lunch, walked around one block of the tourist shops and then got back on the bus to go back to Southwest Harbor. We were all exhausted. The bus would have dropped us off right where the dinghy was docked but Bill and Emilia were remembering the loaf of Sourdough bread they’d seen in the bakery in town the night before that I said they could buy today if they wanted. Emilia formulated a plan that we take the bus to the stop we got on the bus at this morning, buy the bread and also some baked good snack to have for our mid afternoon snack. We all agreed it would be worth the extra walk, especially since it had stopped raining. Now we are all just relaxing on the boat after a very hard day.