Bass and Bar........

7:20 am - Tuesday - May 15th - Southwest Harbor, ME - 48º F, 97% humidity, wind 6 mph out of the south......heavy cloud cover with a forecast high of 58º F, and a 90% chance of rain today.

Our first workday here at Smuggler's Den will be Wednesday, May 16th, so knowing we had two days before we are back on a work schedule we decided to explore Mount Desert Island a little further.....

Our 1st driving tour of many

......first we headed south on ME-102 through Southwest Harbor down to Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse........

 This lighthouse began with a 5th order Fresnel Lens, which is now a 4th order Fresnel red lens with a 10 second flash

.....as is often the case, the view from this lighthouse is captivating, even with the heavy cloud cover....... 

 Easy to catch the flash of this light when it is on for 10 seconds

.....from there we continued our drive around the southern end of the east side of the island on ME-102A.  Acadia National Park is everywhere......here we are at the area called 'Seawall'.....

....we stopped off at the USPS in Southwest Harbor to pick up some mailing supplies, and then snagged a few pictures of the the harbor itself......

......we then continued north on ME-102 up to ME-3 which took us directly to Bar Harbor.  By this time it was after 1 pm, and time to check out the local eateries.  I had located a local pub on Yelp called Finback Alehouse located a block off the Bar Harbor waterfront on Cottage Street.  Yelp give them 4 stars on 302 reviews, so not much ambiguity there.  We quickly found a parking spot right on the wharf and then walked a block up to Finback......

.....we both ordered their vanilla milk stout for our brews.....for our entrees I ordered their Island Fish Tacos (haddock), and TLE their Lobster and Crab Mac & Cheese......these tacos are were on a par with the fish tacos we love at Tony's Crab Shack in Bandon, OR, which are some of my favorite fish tacos ever.  I tasted TLE's Mac & Cheese and it was show stopping!  Frankly, there were 4, or 5 items I would have loved to order, but they will have to wait for another day.......

......the downtown area of Bar Harbor is what you would expect in this very touristy waterfront town.......lots of eateries and boutique shops everywhere.....

......after lunch we spent about an hour walking around the waterfront area just enjoying the scenery and the sunny skies (the cloud cover never left Southwest Harbor, but it was delightfully sunny in Bar Harbor on this day)......

......there was a cruise ship visible in the distance, so no doubt some of the crowd in town on this day was from that ship......

One of the several world class hotels (Bar Habor Inn) on the right in this picture

......we drove ME-233 back through Acadia National Park on our way back to Southwest Harbor and our home arriving there around between 2:30 and 3 pm.......

.......on our drive we noted numerous trailheads (the trailhead for Acadia Mountain is about 1/2 mile from our home) that we plan to visit in the near future when the weather improves a little, as well as the Carriage Roads (45 miles of Carriage Roads) trailhead in Acadia National Park where we plan to take our bikes numerous times this summer to explore the park.  

We have barely scratched the proverbial surface here on Mount Desert Island, but our drive Monday was a big help in getting us oriented and familiar with the local road system.  I spent the afternoon (after a nice nap) continuing the deploy our stuff for the summer.....no point in doing it all in one day, right?

Thanks for stopping by!

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