Whales and horse carriages

The destination for Tuesday was Bar Harbor, ME where we had a whale watching cruise scheduled for 4:30 PM. According to Google Maps, the trip was supposed to only be around 3 1/2 to 4 hours from Portsmouth, NH. We neglected to read the fine print where it said "without traffic". We left Portsmouth around 9:30 or 10:00, thinking we had plenty of time and that we could afford to take the more scenic route up to Bar Harbour, via highway 1. Bad decision, we barely made it in time for our whale watching cruise. Nobody on highway 1 is in any sort of hurry. The average speed is about 40 MPH. 

The whale watching was fun, not sure that it was $60.00 per person fun, but I am glad we did it. Besides being on a jet catamaran on the ocean, which is really cool, we saw approximately 5 or 6 whales. There were a couple of Humpback whales fairly close up and around 4 or 5 Finback whales from a little further away. It was pretty cool to actually see them in person. 

The plan for Wednesday was to do a carriage ride in Acadia National park at 10;30. We had made the reservations on Tuesday. We got their address off their web site and then plugged that into google maps GPS. Well that took us to a ship yard on the opposite side of the island. We had been trying to call the carriage company since early morning to verify their address but all we ever got was a busy signal. When it was clear we weren't going to make our 10:30 appointment, we kept trying to call them and finally, after about an hour of just trying over and over to get through, we managed to get through. We explained what happened and they told us that you can't find them using GPS as their address isn't correct on the web site. They then said that unfortunately they were going to have to charge us for our missed appointment. Their argument was that we should have asked them for directions when we made the reservation. We argued that if there address on their website is incorrect, they should have told us this information and given us directions. To which they replied that most people ask for directions when they make reservations. After a bit of back and forth, they agreed to just book us on a later carriage ride and not charge us for the missed ride.

Since we had some time to kill, we decided to do a hike around Jordon Pond and up Bubble Mtn. It was a nice hike, even if it was cloudy, damp, windy, and cold out. We then had lunch at the Jordon Pond house restaurant, which had a million people on the waiting list. We eventually were seated, outside and by the time we finished lunch, were close to suffering from hypothermia.

After lunch, it was time for the carriage ride. I was not really looking forward to the ride because all I wanted to do was find a nice warm bar and have a beer or wine and warm up. I am glad I went along on the carriage ride because it was very enjoyable. The driver was friendly and made the entire ride fun. 

After the ride, we went into Bar Harbor and had some dinner. We were all feeling pretty wiped out after dinner and so we headed back to the hotel to just do a little relaxing before going to bed.