What a Ride!

Off to the carriage roads today.....A beautiful day....High of about 68 and sunny. Sparky rode 25 miles today, and experienced the gamut of joy at seeing some of her favorite bridges, happiness at meeting a 91 years young spry lady cyclist and fear at coming upon a bike accident right after it just happened.

First the good stuff....Sparky wanted to see some more of the amazing Rockefeller bridges. This time she had a map! Last time she lost the map early on, and a kind high school teacher on a trip with his students airdropped a map of the carriage roads as we stood right next to each other! The marvel of technology, especially since cell service is slim to non-existent on the carriage roads! By the way, the route markers for the carriage roads are every 1.7 miles. Great planning by the park staff! So if you are lost, have faith that a signpost will show up shortly and hopefully get you back on track. Then again, if you are Sparky, they may or may not be helpful to you, haha. (Ask her how she knows that, laughs Eldo.)

OK, first bridge for today, they are not necessarily in order......The Jordan Pond Bridge 1920

The Chasm Brook Bridge 1926, (below) the seventh of 17 bridges...One of the most remote bridges in the system. It's 50 feet long, and there is a small light flowing gorge underneath it during the summer. Nearby are the "Seven Bridges" section of the carriage roads, you want to traverse those going DOWNHILL, not uphill like Sparky ended up doing unintentionally. Those are a series of little wooden bridges where the carriage road zig zags back and forth over the brook.

Chasm Brook Bridge

Cliffside Bridge

The Cliffside Bridge 1932...It's 250 feet tall, it has a 50 ft. segmented arch, parapet walls and looks like the side wall of a castle. It does not cross a stream or a road, but helps complete the carriage road by hugging the steep cliffs of Penobscot Mountain. It has a couple of viewing platforms on it which make for spectacular views!

Sparky's favorite bridge, the Amphitheater Bridge 1931..it is one of the longest bridges at 245 feet and has a single arch that spans Little Harbor Brook. The beauty of these bridges can sometimes only be seen if you look for stone steppers or a well worn overgrown path alongside one of the ends of the bridges. If you are riding over them, it would be easy to miss their spectacular facades below the carriage roads.

The West Branch Bridge 1931...115 feet in length, and just a single arch.

After riding for a bit, Sparky came to the Eagle Lake junction of the carriage roads, and met up with this spunky senior. This is Lindy, and she is 91 (!!!) years old. When she  was in her seventies, she biked cross country from one coast to the other! Sparky says to her, "You are AMAZING!"  She instantly replied, "I AM!" and grinned. We chatted a bit. She offered to help Sparky get redirected as to what direction and which carriage road to take next. Her bike is a Trek bike and had about a thousand dollars worth of retrofitting to make it extremely light for her. (Hmmmmm, I sense there might be a bike shop visit in the near future, says Eldo.) Sparky's Trek is a heavy 32 pound bike, a little too heavy for gravelly elevated trails, but yet a great workout. Lindy was terrific to chat with, and an inspiration, as she bikes EVERY day! She and her family were out on the trails today, soaking up the beautiful weather. She IS amazing, that's for sure!

As the afternoon came, Sparky was headed back to Hull's Cove after 20 some miles of riding, and came upon a group of people stopped, one elderly gentleman had just lost control of his bike and crashed into the rocky side of the road. He was bleeding badly from his face. They had a few first aid supplies. Sparky was the first one on the scene. She asked if they needed help, and they said, yes, they needed a paramedic. No decent cell signal and they couldn't get a call to go through with 9-1-1. Sparky offered to go get help on her bike and back she pedaled like a bat out of hell, back to Jordan's Pond House about a mile back, where she could make a call. On the way back, a family on E-bikes was heading uphill in the opposite direction towards the accident. Sparky asked for their help as they could get back to a decent cell signal faster than she could on her traditional bike. Off they went. Sparky headed back to the accident site. In the meantime, one of the people in the party was able to get a temporary signal and the emergency services got a ping on their GPS location. Help was on the way. This made Sparky aware of perhaps taking a few first aid supplies on the next long bike ride out. You never know when you might need something like that, even for yourself! Hope things worked out ok for the gentleman.

The rest of the ride was uneventful, except for the fantastic views as you bike along marshes and ponds...What beautiful views! Sparky went for another kind of ride yesterday....A kayak ride in Frenchman's Bay. Lots and lots of water, no really interesting views. She rented a kayak from the Narrows Too campground. Ten dollars an hour for the first hour, then five dollars an hour after that. What she didn't know was that, there were only two kayaks for the entire campground, and they were SEA kayaks (read longer than the usual shorty kayaks most places rent, AND they were each a HEAVY tandem kayak. No worries, Sparky's got this, she's an experienced kayaker, so out she went with a little help getting the big heavy kayak off the stand and  down to the water's edge.

Right after she got out on the water, the only interesting feature besides a whole bunch of seagulls roosting, was a little itty bitty crab swimming in the water.

Ooh, ooh, ooh! She's got to get a picture, right? Picture this: she passes by the little swimming crab only to realize, gee, he's really cute so she needs a photo. How to quickly stop a 16 foot heavy sea kayak? You don't! Sparky shoots past him and puts on the brakes with her paddle. (Insert screaming car brakes here, cartoon style). It takes a mighty effort of backpedaling on one side with the paddle end and heaving a great big pull through on the other side with the other paddle end to start to swing the nose of the kayak around. In the meantime, the little crab swims underneath the boat. Sparky is down moving away from the little crab. A brisk breeze is also blowing her sideways.  She's gonna try AGAIN!  Pull hard, back paddle, swing that darn boat around, she glides right past him again while fiddling with her iPhone, which is NOT tethered to anything. (Don't worry, she didn't drop the phone. Whew! Couldn't find the lanyard for it this morning). Third time is the charm. Here is that elusive, cute little guy....Sparky will have sore arms later, that's for sure!

The only other cool thing Sparky saw while out in the bay was a squabble of seagulls. Yep, that's what a whole bunch of them are called, at least one of the more interesting names besides a flock. They sure make a lot of noise like they are squabbling. Maybe that's where the name came from!

Door Mountain Trail

We have one more week to go here at Narrows Too... We hope to hike a couple of trails at Acadia. Sparky tried to get to Gorham Mountain Trail today, and our big dually truck couldn't find a parking spot. They are now letting people park on portions of the national park Park Road in the right lane on one way only portions of the roadway, but Sparky was worried about her mirrors on the truck getting hit or the truck getting sideswiped because it's so big, so she went to the "quieter" side of Mount Desert Island and hiked the Door Mountain Trail for a couple of miles....It's VERY rocky after a beautiful portion through a heavily wooded forest and a good heart workout of a climb to the summit. The Door Trail has good cairns (stone slabs marking direction of the trail) on the way up, keeping you on trail. 

So many great hikes on the island, so little time! But we'll keep trying to find good times to avoid the crowds as the trail parking lot are starting to fill early and traffic congestion in the Bar Harbor/Acadia area is getting worse. 

We did manage to visit Schoodic Point, a "quieter" side of Acadia National Park. Schoodic Point is the far tip of the island south of Winter Harbor, on the Schoodic Peninsula. The ocean crashes against the rock cliffs, and you can clamber all around the rock formations and look for cool marine life in the tidal pools when the tide is out.

It is one of the more spectacular parts of Acadia, and not to be missed.

Well, that about sums up our first 8 days here. The weather continues to be absolutely gorgeous, highs in the sixties and high seventies interspersed with rain showers and gusty winds coming off from the ocean. We are sorry to see family and friends struggling with extreme heat temperatures just about everywhere else. Take care...stay hydrated, don't walk your pets on hot sidewalks, Eldy read where temperatures on cement were over 140 degrees (!) and thanks for reading...We will see you soon down the road again.....