Leaving New York

JFK Terminal 4 - Monday, 14 Jun 2021, 11:15am.

It's Planes, Trains, and Automobiles again today. We've driven back down to New York City and taken the tram to JFK Airport to fly out to Bangor, Maine. So far, so good. Of course that's mainly because we've planned ample time in our schedule.

We allowed over an hour for the drive. We did hit a bit of traffic on the way despite it being after rush hour. We still arrived early. Though the slow tram partly made up for that we still reached the airport almost 2 hours before departure.

"Great," we thought, "We'll have time for brunch." Well, we did have time but what we did not have were choices. Half or more of the restaurants in the airport terminal are closed. Despite travel returning toward pre-pandemic levels (at least for leisure travel) restaurants are not opening back up yet. Maybe they're waiting for surer recovery, maybe they're having trouble hiring people back in this weird labor market.

We're at our gate now, cooling our heels while waiting for boarding to start in about 25 minutes. The flight to Bangor will take 1 hour 45 minutes. We've got first class seats again, another coup like our SFO-JFK flight where we scored premium tickets cheaply by booking a few months ago, ahead of the post-pandemic rush. Coach class tickets now cost more than what we paid for first/business several months ago, and first/business tickets sell for 2-4x their previous prices. Yay, getting back to normal. 🙄

Rolling from Bangor to Bar Harbor

Maine Week Travelog #1
Bar Harbor, ME - Monday, 14 Jun 2021, 4pm.

We kicked off our week in Maine today when we landed at Bangor airport (BGR). It's a small airport; apparently it has only 4 gates. It's not the smallest we've been to, though. That would be Chadron, NE (CDR), the one-room schoolhouse of airports. Small is good in this case as we got through the airport quickly. With our flight landing just before its scheduled time of 1:45pm, we were walking out the door with checked luggage and rental car keys in hand by 1:58pm.

Our flight up from New York City? I slept through most of it. Yay, first class seats with adequate leg, hip, and elbow room. Even if nowhere near as luxurious as on Friday's trans-con.

Try our Delicious 2nd Amendment Special!

Once out of the airport we started rolling toward Bar Harbor, or "Bah Habbah" as local Mainers pronounce it. We looked for lunch along the way, as first class tickets on today's flight only came with a cookie and a small can of soda, but the choices were slim. The city of Bangor ("Banguh") really puts the small in small town. We barely saw any restaurants, and most of them were of the "Mel's Hardware, Bait, and Sandwiches" variety. Oh, but there were plenty of guns. In the first 10 miles of our drive we passed by 4 gun stores, 1 proper restaurant (it was a Subway, so maybe not even proper), 1 fireworks store, and 1 church.

As we got closer down to the coast of ratio of guns:restaurants (and also guns:churches) improved. Still the restaurant situation wasn't good. We ate a late lunch at a gas station deli and then headed on to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park.

Getting Oriented at Acadia

We made a quick stop at the park visitors center before checking in to our hotel. The center closes at 4:30, and we didn't want to risk missing it.

Like many parks seem to be doing post-Covid, the rangers here moved the information desk to an outdoors location where people can space out better and reduce risk by avoiding indoors spaces. It's good they did because the park is crowded right now! Especially for a weekday afternoon it seems busy. I'm glad we're here midweek and not on a weekend.

At the visitors center we bought a topographical map for hiking and got lots of suggestions from the rangers about trails to visit. Unfortunately one of the trails near the top of our list is closed right now due to nesting peregrine falcons. Dang hawks!

After gathering maps and info at the park office we headed down into town for our hotel. Well, not quite into town. The Holiday Inn we're staying at is a mile or two away from downtown Bar Harbor. It's on nice, spacious grounds with lawns and trees. We'll see how preferable that is to being in the center of the action in town.