maine vacation ~ the rest of acadia, bar harbor, & the SPLINTER

Just a few more photos from some of the lookout points along the loop road in Acadia National Park...

For our first visit to the park, I had envisioned a nice, bright, sunny picnic lunch overlooking the ocean; INSTEAD, we had a pleasant, gloomy, lightly-sprinkling picnic from the back end of our van with the back hatch of our van being our shelter from the drizzle. A memory, I must say!

Notice Levi in the picture above...he didn't want to sit in the van with the our kids, and he eventually ended up sitting on the pavement itself to eat. Silly boy!

Of course, we did have a visitor at our picnic. Meet Seagull #1.

After we were finished touring the Acadia National Park, we drove to Bar Harbor. There wasn't anything too exciting about this town...just a typical tourist town. The harbor was pretty neat to look at though. This multi-masted ship was also a unique sight.

We found Owen's favorite store at Bar Harbor. The upstairs had an informational spot about the different animals of the area. He loved the snakes in the jars.

Owen also loved this seeing this black bear as well.

There were 2 interesting stories to tell that occurred in the town of Bar Harbor. First, as we were hanging out in the town's park, a girl had walked by and recognized our friend, Joel! Here, (I believe this is how the story goes) this girl worked as a hairdresser in the same shop that Joel got his hair cut in Kansas before leaving on his vacation to Maine. (Did that make any sense at all???) Did I mention that we are vacationing with a bunch of celebrities?

Then, in this same park, a little girl and her parents were sitting on a park bench. The parents were trying to calm this little girl down who was crying and screaming hysterically, "NOOOOOO! It hurrrrrrrrts! NOOOOOOOO! I can't do it! NO, I can't do it! It hurts!" Pretty much everyone in the park was looking at them, and we noticed that all of the park benches that had people on them were suddenly becoming empty as they didn't want to bear witness to the events unfolding. It looked like a scene from that nighttime newsish-type show, "What Would You Do?" The parents were practically sitting on the little girl and doing something to her hand...

Wait a minute...that was US! The little girl was Ivy, and she had gotten a splinter embedded in her finger! This little girl was a wreck. She was out of control and hysterical and would not let her Daddy even look at her finger let alone try to get the splinter out. After a quick dash to the local pharmacy for some tweezers, we set off to get that big ouchy out of her finger. Breathing deep breaths, praying, and reciting Ivy's go-to memory verse of Joshua 1:9 over and over and over and over again was the only thing that helped Ivy get the courage enough to even give her Daddy her finger. After about 30 or 40 minutes (which seemed like an eternity), the splinter was FINALLY out! Such a brave girl!

Our sweet friends took care of Owen and Letty as we were dealing with Ivy and her splinter. We are so thankful that we were able to just focus on Ivy and not have to worry about keeping our eyes on our other 2 energetic little ones too. Thank you so much, Joel and Jess!

Now that we had all survived the splinter incident, it was time to get some pizza.

And then, because ice cream was promised to Ivy during her splinter ordeal, we found an ice cream shop for a sweet treat!

After a long day out and about, it was time to get out of Bar Harbor and get back to our cottage!