Day 9 July Cruise Northeast Harbor 2nd day Friday July 24, 2020

Day 9 July Cruise Northeast Harbor 2nd day Friday July 24, 2020

The night was mild and the air was calm. The sun was up and out all day. Temperatures in high seventies - perfect day.

Today was hiking day.

In recent years, the Island Explorer Bus Service would be our ferry around the Acadia National Park. We could get to many different trails and use it to drop us on one end of a trail and pick us up on the other end - meaning hiking options were wonderful for us boaters. But as you can see this wonderful service is out of service for this year.

So we did one of our favorite hikes that fortunately starts in NEH and ends at Jordan Pond.

The hike takes us up the trail to Thuya Gardens. But the Gardens had limited hours and we will have to remember past years. You can check out how great it is looking at last year's August 25, 2019 post

There is a wonderful overlook. Not all the open mooring balls that would normally be filled with fellow cruising boat. Note the roof line of the shelter - I have picture of it from the boat in the post below.

I forgot my selfie stick but guess my arms are long enough for today.

The scarecrow in the Wizard of OZ would have a tough time here. We are headed to Jordan Pond - "exit stage left" as Snagglepuss the tiger would say.

And after just over 3 miles we arrive at Jordan Pond. There is a pond you can see in the distance but there is also Jordan Pond the restaurant with the famous lawn that is filled in other years with tables for outside dining. But as you can see this is not other years.

But there is take out type service and there are tables inside and a few on the patio. As you can see we were still able to get sandwiches and the famous popovers so we felt that they were doing a great job of making the most of a difficult situation,

This scene is so strange as in normal years there would be hundreds of folks in this picture. But fortunately the mountains and the lakes didn't run off and hide to avoid the virus.

And this photo would not feature the blue things in a normal year. Hopefully, we will not need them next year. We were glad to see nearly everyone using a mask around the restaurant.

And there are still some enjoying the carriage trails. I didn't see that they had any poop bags with them though.

Normally we would take the Explorer Bus back to NEH. But having no other choice and being the spry youngsters that we are, we hoofed it back to NEH.

We noted that there even seemed to be less birds singing - guess they are social distancing as well.