Day 23
We made it!! We drove the rest of the way to Narrow’s Too RV Park in Trenton, Maine, which is about 20 minutes from Bar Harbor. We are glad to be staying in one place for a few weeks, aside from driving the Jeep to Nova Scotia for 4 nights.
Driving through Boston was VERY stressful! More so than NYC, actually. Not because of traffic, but because the route was nuts. We went into a tunnel under the whole downtown area, which had lots of height and hazardous material warning signs and flashing lights (we’re still not sure if our on-board propane was excluded). After the tunnel you are immediately on a bridge! After the bridge you do a full 180 and go into another tunnel, followed immediately by the lower level of a viaduct bridge that had construction areas that reduced the width of my lane so much that the RV would have had body damage if I went 6″ off the center of the lane. Then we saw a 5 ton weight limit sign (we are 20 tons), but then realized the sign was for an exit. Never again will I drive an RV through Boston…should have routed around the city.
Some of the toll booths were extremely narrow also, which I had to inch through.
We drove through New Hampshire to Maine, knocking a couple more states off our list! Only a few more to go before we’ve been in all 50!
To be honest, we were a little tired of driving through Maine. The Fall colors are nice, but man, after several hours of nothing but forest it does get a little old. No mountains, but the rare views of the water and some meadows were nice! We were itching for something to break up the scenery. I’m sure it doesn’t help that we’ve been on the road for 5 days now, and are ready to not be moving.
Oh, and since I’m an evergreen nut, I was paying attention to what kinds of trees there were all the way up here. There were tons of pine trees in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, but only after we got into Maine did we see naturally growing spruces and hemlocks. I thought we would have seen those farther south.
We saw a few moose warning signings, but no luck….no moose seen! Or, as Brian Regan would have called them, meese…or moosen!
It was a HUGE pain to get our RV into our site, but we did it! We probably had to forward and backward about 15 times, turning a little each time.
To make things harder, we have really bad cellular service, so Carla and I couldn’t hear each other as one of us was trying to direct the other. One of our two-way radios was dead so we couldn’t use those either. We had to resort to hand signals. We were totally in the RV site across the street, within a foot of hitting their nice fifth wheel, trying to shimmy into our site. If they had been in it with their truck in their site, we would have had to ask them to move it. I also had to break some tree branches off and had to climb the RV ladder to move some other branches on top of the roof so they wouldn’t crunch into the back of the RV. Man, were we glad to be done driving and parking!!
We hung up the hammock, got a fire going and roasted hotdogs! It was in the low 60s! Perfect night! The sky is so black tonight that the Milky Way is much brighter than I ever remember seeing it. I wish I had my telescope!
Day 24
We went down to Bar Harbor to check out the Towne and walk around the shops. We ate at Geddy’s, which has a really awesome clam chowder!
We came back and hung out at the campground.
Tripp trying out his new spyglass:
I got to apply the stickers for the new states we covered on our way here!
It’s funny how many RVs are pulling Jeep Wranglers. I wonder if it’s because they are prepared for snow. Below is a photo where you can see four of them!
Day 25
Just a cool, dreary, drizzly day today! It was a full day of school and work, and it was mostly dark by the time I got off work.
We are mostly looking forward to Acadia National Park and Nova Scotia soon!
Tripp and I had fun walking over to one of the vacant waterfront RV sites to see a boat we kept hearing. He got to use his new spyglass and I used binoculars we bought in Alaska. Funny, because the dreary weather, talk trees and ocean made Tripp say “It feels like Alaska”. I think the boat we were watching was dragging a fishing net or something. Just a loud gurgling motor as the boat moved slowly in circles.
We finally tried some Maine lobster from Smokey’s. one of the many local “lobster pounds”…meh…guess we aren’t lobster fans! But that’s ok.
The unhealthy marriage is a pretty funny description: on their menu:
We are wanting to go on a whale / puffin watching cruise, but not sure when we’ll get to do that. Maybe after we get back from NS. Planning to drive / hike Acadia next week also.
Oh, and we’ve really noticed that there are very few families up in this area right now. School is back in session! Lots of retired people. Literally boat loads of them crowding every sidewalk in Bar Harbor from cruise ships!
We may start heading south a little earlier than we planned if the weather continues to be cold and wet after we get back from NS. We really came up a few weeks later than we would have liked, but couldn’t change it due to needing to be in Florida for a conference. California is sounding pretty awesome right now! 🙂
The RV park Internet service still stinks, despite the park getting emptier as they get closer to the end of their season.
Sorry there’s nothing fun to report on today, but a lot of days are just like that when you’re traveling for weeks on end. It’s like being at home, in that you only have lunch hours, evenings, and weekends to do the fun things, weather permitting. I’m also running low on time off since it’s getting late in the year, so I have to budget my time off carefully and only take off when it makes sense.
Oooo ooo ooo! I also at forgot something exciting! On my lunch break today, I reattached some rubber seals on a few bay doors that were driving me nuts for months! Hahaha, it was fun to me anyway. It felt like being on Eliza Island in Washington for some reason. The cool, gray damp weather, tall evergreens, being on an island, etc. I reminded myself of my grandpa who would be working on stuff around the cabin when we would be up there. I was also chopping kindling yesterday, which was a common thing to do at the island. Now I’m the one fixing things, chopping wood, and telling kids to stop being noisy and stop causing trouble. I’m getting old!
Day 26
Just another day of work and school. We checked out the L.L Bean outlet store and ate at the Log Cabin restaurant. Pretty low key day.
I discovered some locally made root beer called Old Soaker that is really good!
And I had to try the clam chowder everywhere we go! :)
Day 27
Work and school today, and during lunch we attempted to go to Jordan Pond House to eat lunch in Acadia National Park, which was a rookie mistake. I thought I would work on the way there (about 25 minutes away) while Carla drove, but we lost cellular service as soon as we got near the park. So much for working on the way there and back, which meant I would have to work late to make up the time if we were to eat lunch there. Well, I didn’t have to worry about that because when we got into the park the parking lots were jam packed. Even if we had parked a long way away, it probably would have been a long wait to get into the restaurant. When we get back from Nova Scotia, we will plan better and do some hiking around the park and then hit the restaurant at the same time.
It was killing me to see all these beautiful trail head parking lots on our way into and out of the park. I can’t wait to come back and hike next week!
Here’s some of the scenery just outside the park.
We checked out the view from site 317 which we will be moving into after we get back from Nova Scotia. It has an awesome view! The tide was out so we got to see lots of seaweed and rocks exposed.
Tripp was having fun looking at the different kinds of berries growing on the shrubs around the campsite. 

Tonight we were scrambling to get everything packed and loaded for our trip to Nova Scotia tomorrow! Carla is excited that the in we are staying at has a bathtub!
We all have to get up at 6 AM to get the puppies to a kennel, because I forgot that we had booked the kennel for today and we could’ve dropped them off earlier. That, combined with the fact that we have to make it to a ferry terminal 3.5 hours away in New Brunswick by 1:15 PM (which is +1hr in Atlantic Daylight Time) and we’re not sure if we will get hung up at the Canada border since we have lots of gear and food on the Jeep. . It’s going to be an exciting and interesting day for sure!
We were laughing today about how we will have gone from a house to an RV, to a small inn, to a tent on this trip!
It’s been crazy trying to get everything we need into the Jeep for five days away from the RV that includes two hotel nights, two nights in a tent, along with all of the off-road gear for our trail runs on Saturday (including extra fluids, tools, lots of recovery gear, air pump, jacks, and all the other stuff that is needed).  All of that for four people means you have to really pack things well in order for everything to fit. Having to take cold-weather clothes means they take up a lot more room also!
Nothing like loading storage containers onto the roof with a flashlight at 9 PM (trying to be quiet in the RV park) and then heading to Walmart for last minute things!
It’s now 12:00am, and the alarm clock will be going off in about 6 hours…going to need a lot of caffeine tomorrow!