watching a very old episode of Waking the Dead mainly because there's f'all on TV as per usual. Eating some Maine blueberries & wishing I was back there. It was my first trip to Maine & it's absolutely gorgeous there. Not at all like the PNW beyond the rough similarities of big trees and rugged/rocky coastline.  We stayed in Bar Harbor at an okay hotel w/a nice balcony & lousy service. It was a good location though & we got to use the local free bus service (great idea - Sedona should try this!) to get around.  We did lots of touristy things like a 3 hour Nat'l Parks bus tour w/a highly entertaining driver/guide named George. He drove like a wildman all along the very steep & winding Park Loop Road but told us great stories all the way.  We stopped at a few places for 15 minutes each: Thunder Hole (which was very unimpressive), Cadillac Mountain Summit, and the Jordan Pond House.  We'd been to Cadillac Mountain that morning at 4:30 (ouch!) to catch the sunrise but it was nice to see it during the day & Roger showed us wild Maine  mountain cranberries - SO good. And of course, the ever present wild blueberries. We did a Whale Watch tour which was worth the overcrowding, the annoying girl who ruined most of my photos, and the incredibly high ticket price.  We went 20 miles out to sea and we saw both puffins AND humpback whales. They came right up to the boat. We hiked the Beachcroft Trail, then swam & got sunburned at Sand Beach & then hiked the Ocean Trail out to Otter Cliffs.  I took hundreds of photos & most of them turned out okay though, of course, not the photos of the humpbacks. I could've spent many more days hiking around the lovely trails in Acadia but sadly, I have to pay rent.  Bar Harbor itself was okay - packed with tourists & very little in the way of decent vegetarian food.  There is LOTS of good local beer and the service in most places was good.  Testa's was a big exception with perhaps some of the WORST service I've ever had: a waitress who kept disappearing & had a MAJOR attitude when I finally gave up and asked for our food & our check.  The Thirsty Whale was great as was a small Irish place we went to. My guidebook listed a place called "Eden" but we found out from locals that it was closed :( and so we went to the local Thai place which was pretty awful -perhaps the worst pad thai I've ever had.  We ate at the local "fancy" organic place, Burning Tree and that was okay but they were really trying too hard with combining flavors. The advertised "vegetarian options" consisted of veggies (mostly peppers) on skewers or an overblown miso/tofu soup with lots of bok choy.  The service was great as was the setting - the food not what I'd hoped for but certainly better than the Thai place. The best part of the trip? sitting on the hotel balcony watching the sailboats anchored outside and the sun on the water. or the sunrise from Cadillac Mountain. or diving into the freezing cold ocean on Sand Beach. or...anyway, hope to get back to Maine again soon though likely I won't for quite some time.