New England 10/10 MDI to Augusta ME

One of the attractions we saw on MDI was the sand bar going from Bar Harbor to Bar Island. The sand bar is exposed during low tide.



The moon and the sun cause the tides on earth - their gravity pulls the water in the oceans toward them, so as the earth rotates the water moves up and down the seashore. There are two "high tides" each day, and two "low tides" each day.

This morning, the lowest tide would be at 9:03. We got there at about 8:45 and the sand bar looked like this:


Six hours from now, this sand bar will be under 4 to 8 feet of water!


See the rock in the water on the left? Remember it.
Here is a view of Bar Harbor from the top of Bar Island:


I climbed up for a look. Poppa had to help Dottie, because dogs don't climb very well:



Autumn's mommy tells me that Autumn climbs as well as I do:



$5 minutes later we are coming back across the sandbar. Can you see that the rock on the left isn't in the water any more?



This is low tide.

The families that owned Bar Island argued about development of the island and plans to build a bridge across the sand bar. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. quietly bought up the 1/3 of the island at the sand bar around 1908 to keep the island from being developed. He also paid for the Acadia National Park Loop Road and made other major contributions to the national Park system.

It's interesting that he hated cars, because his father, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. founded Standard Oil, and that is why the family were gazillionaires. For anyone interested in robber barons, there are two books that Poppa recommends: "The Prize", by Daniel Yergin, and "Titan", by Ron Chernow.

One more thing before we leave Maine. They keep talking about "Down East" when the rest of us would be saying "up the coast of Maine". You can check it out on Google, but the main (Maine) idea is that they were sailing down the wind as it blows east on the Maine coast.

After we left MDI, we west across part of Maine to Gardiner, where we had a laundry and grocery day. We need to get back in touch with that campground to ask about the beautiful evergreen at the entrance and about the list of "nearbys" - Paris: 73 miles,Peru: 82 miles,... Maybe more on that later!

- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa