The Best Laid Plans....

You know what they say about best laid plans...
Last weekend we had 4 days off in a row (it was fall break at the University)! Two days off a week this time of year is pretty much unheard of so 4 days is an unbelievable treat! We spent most of the time getting things done around the house (like finally moving the office into the basement)! But...we planned to spend Monday in Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. Our plans involved lunch at some great little resteraunt in Bar Harbor, a canoe ride in the park, and early Christmas ornament shopping in town (one of our traditions), and likely some incredible ice cream. Sounds nice doesn't it? Well, nothing really went as planned that day. As we attempted to drive into Bar Harbor we hit some unbelievable traffic- as in we sat in our car for 30 minutes pretty much without moving. Yeah, nobody was going anywhere (at least moving towards Bar Harbor). So after half an hour we gave up, turned around, and headed back into Ellsworth. And that would be where we spent our afternoon. So instead of all my plans for a fun, beautiful, quaint, relaxing afternoon we made due. We ate lunch at Friendly's (because we were starving and at least their ice cream is really good). We shopped at Marden's (which is where Joe let Lily pick out the Clifford stuffed dog you see in these pictures). We tried to shop for ornaments- no luck. We tried to find a pick-your-own pumpkin place- no luck. But we did find an apple orchard open (and since we have used up most of the 4 bags of apples we picked on our previous two trips we decided to go again). The apples at this place were huge (or maybe just normal sized- but they seemed huge compared to the ones we picked earlier)! And they had these ingenious poles (pictured above) to use to get the best apples near the top- brillant!! So, we got more apples. And then as we were heading home Lily had a little fit because she really wanted to go to Bar Harbor. So we stopped at a nearbye lake and spent half an hour throwing stones into the water (apparently this was close enough to Bar Harbor for Lily). Not exactly the day we had planned, but hey, now we have a stuffed Clifford dog to add to our collection!:)