After a great night’s sleep, we got the kids up at around 6:45 to go to an 8:00am Mass.  After Mass, we went back to the campsite for breakfast.  Nicholas mixed up the pancakes while Charlie cooked them.  I sat to the side doing pretty much nothing.  Eventually, they needed someone to cut up the pancakes for the younger kids, so that became my job.  I believe, out of habit, I even cut up pancakes for all the older kids too :0  Oh well.  After brunch, I headed out to take care of the laundry.  It cost $29.50 to do the laundry for all of us for a few days.  Wow!  Meanwhile, Charlie and the kids had a good time just playing at the campground.

When I got back, we discussed the options of what to do for the rest of the afternoon.  We decided to go into Acadia National Park to pick up a park map and schedule.  That way we could decide what we wanted to do tomorrow.  After buying our pass for a week, we saw that they were also selling an audio tour CD.  We bought that so we could take an audio tour in our van.  After we got back to the van, the kids pointed out that we don’t have a CD player in the van (we just bought a new radio for the van so that we could have Bluetooth and listen to music we have downloaded – however the new radio did not come with a CD player).  I had a quick moment of panic until I realized that I had my laptop in the van, so we downloaded the CD to our iTunes library and then copied it onto an iPod.  After finally getting through all the technical difficulties, we started following the audio tour, which did a good job at explaining various aspects of the park.  The trouble we ran into didn’t really have anything to do with the audio tour; Charlie had thought we would do this quick audio tour to give us an idea of which parts of the park really interested us and that we would come back to see.  However, the rest of us were having a hard time passing by all the beautiful areas of the park without stopping and getting out to see them and taking pictures.  This was a perpetual conflict the entire time we did the tour. 

The tour finally culminated in a drive up Cadillac Mountain, the highest mountain on the East Coast.  The sites from there were stunning.  A wonderfully friendly woman took a picture of all of us, and we all had a great time walking around on the exposed granite to see the stunning views.

We also had the difficulty of kids whining in the back seat about being hungry.  We had made the mistake of not bringing dinner or any snacks with us because we weren’t going to be gone on the tour that long.  Hopefully, “we” (let’s just clarify and say that I was NOT the one who made this decision) have learned from this mistake and will at least bring snacks along in the future.  When kids have only had brunch and it’s about 8:00pm before you ever make it back to the campsite, they are pretty hungry.  I did finally remember that I had 2 ½ granola bars that we split among 10 kids.  I don’t think that even made a dent in their hunger, but it satisfied them enough that we didn’t have to listen to any more whining for maybe all of 15 minutes.

We finally made it back and fixed a quick meal of tuna on top of salads.  Tomorrow we would venture back into the park, but for now we were all going to get a good night’s sleep.