Minimoon 1: Bar hopping

I write tucked away on the third floor of a B&B in Bar Harbor. Our room is a bit small — the door can't open fully, due to the bed — and the brass-headboarded bed is, if not the squeakiest object or device man has yet invented, certainly the squeakiest bed. But two things tip the scales toward the good: chewy homemade chocolate chip cookies available 24/7, and a 120-year-old water closet serving as toilet in our bathroom — you pull a chain to flush! There was a jowly-faced dog (possibly a French mastiff) downstairs to welcome us, too. Joy!

We're here on our minimoon. (The real honeymoon will happen next summer, when we theoretically scoot off to Italy.) We arrived in midafternoon, just in time to check in and then wander with the gulls and the tourists across the wide, barnacled sandbar that leads to Bar Island at low tide. Bar Island itself was in the process of being swallowed: streamers and billows of sea fog were pouring in from the ocean and bulking up against the windward shore. The fog had already swallowed the Porcupines, but on Bar Island it only enveloped half the island, and trailed away to nothing on the leeward side. We trooped up to the summit, worried the whole time that the sandbar would disappear beneath the waves behind us, and watched Bar Harbor and the surrounding mountains appear and disappear through the fog. The trail was rich with splendid mushrooms.

Then Dinner at This Way Café, which was delicious: crab cakes with a tequila lime sauce for starters, sea scallops and garlic mashed potatoes for adfamiliares, fried cubes of ahi (rare in the middle) with crispy sweet potato fries and wasabi tartar sauce for me, and Bailey's-flavored crème brûlée for dessert. Delicious, as I say, but we were very cold by the end, sitting outside as we were, and we hustled back through a light drizzle to snuggle in our noisy noisy bed and watch Project Runway.

So far, couldn't be better. Tomorrow: Thunder Hole, Bubble Rock, and popovers.