Acadia and Sand Beach

Acadia National Park
Woke up to day to the sun but, unfortunately, everyone did not get up until late so we did not get to Acadia until around 11:30 or so. It’s about a 45 minute drive from Blue Hill. We thought we were going to bike, so we headed to the bike shop and ordered our bikes. After we got all the bikes (including the tandem for Asha), we headed out to the shuttle stop that would take us up into the park. Marci, Brian and Lauren had rented bikes earlier and attempted to ride bikes into the park and apparently there is a 1.5 mile hill that they did not want to attempt a second time.
We stopped at a café, Michelle’s brown bag, to get our sandwiches for lunch. I got a Reuben, no sauerkraut, a ham and cheese sandwich for Kesh and some buckeyes and chips. The sandwiches were fine but the store wouldn’t even put a bit of water in my water bottle. The buckeyes were good. I haven’t had those in ages.
Armed with our sandwiches in our carrybag on the back of the tandem, we headed to the shuttle where the shuttle driver tells us they can’t take the tandem. We told the bike rental place we were going on a shuttle, but they failed to mention that the tandem couldn’t go on the bus. So, now we had to debate what we could do. The hill? Leave asha? Abandon the bikes? Some people bike, others do something else? Finally, after much discussion, we gave up the bikes and decided we’d ride the shuttle to sand beach instead.
By now, it was 1pm and people were a bit frustrated, to say the least, and they were hungry. So we walked to the harbor (through crowds of people) and sat on the stone wall at the harbor to eat our sandwiches while Marci and I listened to the various complaints from our poor, deprived, children. We tried to ignore most of them.
We caught the 2:05 shuttle to sand beach. It was fairly busy but we decided to walk first. We wanted to do the beehive hike which was supposed to be at this stop but we couldn’t find it. The signage was terrible. None of the hikes were marked and we ended up walking along the coast. This was a beautiful walk that eventually took us to some rock formations that jutted out into the ocean that we could walk out on almost to the ocean waves. This struck Marci and I as a bit dangerous and we had to pull the kids away once we realized that unlike on the coast if a kid got swept out by a wave, the water would only be a few feet deep, here it was probably very deep.
Then we returned to Sand Beach where the kids had the best time. At first, they were just going to play on the beach, then take their shoes off and wade, then get in to their knees, and finally all four of them were soaked from head to their fully clothed bodies to their toes. We had no second change of clothes and no towels. So, when the kids were finished they rinsed off their feet and legs and we cobbled together some sweatshirts that Marci and I had been holding. We caught the shuttle back and the kids shivered back to Bar harbor.
We bought all the kids pajama bottoms and the boys socks and they changed out of their sopping pants. By now, the bike disappointment was long forgotten.