Holiday to New England in Oct 2023: Day 5 – Bar Harbor to Littleton

A fun day of driving awaited us as we headed towards the end of our first week of our holiday heading into New Hampshire.

Today we were heading to the west to a town called Littleton.

We were slowly adjusting to the jet lag. I managed to sleep through til after 3am. Vick managed an extra hour on top of that.

Last night we watched The Prestige on HBO, which is a great film with a stellar cast. We switched off a tad before 9pm, so we did well with our sleep, both having in excess of 6 hours.

We decided to forgo our booked slot to head up Cadillac Mountain, for getting on the road early. We left Bar Harbor at 6:30am, as it was just getting light.

First stop was Bangor about 45 miles down the road, where we found a Starbucks. We had breakfast and enjoyed getting the first section of our long drive out of the way.

We then hit the I95, which was our easiest section of the drive today: dual carriageway all the way for 80 miles to the next Starbucks at Augusta.

We had to endure the longest wait for a Starbucks we have ever experienced. All the focus was on drive-thru orders, then there was a huge mobile order queue as well.

After 30 mins we finally got our drinks, so rather sit in, we decided to drink and drive.

Next stop was Bethel, which was in between Augusta and Littleton. As it happens, there wasn’t a lot going on in Bethel, so we decided to carry on with the final stretch to Littleton.

The day had been fairly overcast, so consequently it was a little bit on the chilly side. On the plus side, at least it was dry.

We arrived at the Hampton Inn, Littleton around 1:30pm. Our room wasn’t ready, so we walked into town, which was about 40 mins away. It was our first opportunity of the day for us to stretch our legs. Well appreciated.

Littleton was an odd mix of outer run-down town with an inner upscale, modern selection of shops and eateries.

We found Chutters, the best candy store in the world and the restaurant we had booked later that evening. Vick bought some peanut butter and maple syrup fudge.

We got back to the hotel around 3:30pm and we picked up our keys to room 127. First time we had ever had a room on the ground floor.

We drove out to Shaw’s (a supermarket just across the road), to pick up bread, cheese, ham etc for sandwiches and dinner tomorrow. We planned on eating in as a change to eating out.

We drove back to Littleton to go out for dinner at the Tim Bir Alley restaurant, which was a small restaurant with slow service, but very good food.

It was also cold; perhaps not helped by me insisting on sitting in the window and it being a tad chilly outside.

If you can cope with long waits in between courses, this place is highly recommended by us!

When we left the restaurant, it was raining – the first of this holiday. So, combined with it being a little chilly, didn’t enhance our experience of Littleton!

On the way back to the hotel, we popped to Walmart and back to Shaw’s again to do some extra shopping – we had missed some important ingredients for our inhouse catering planned for the next day.

Later that night, we wondered whether our pussies were ok in a fairly chilly house. Although our cat flap suggested that both were in the house and we could see Mango in her normal bed on the landing, we weren’t sure where Chutney was. We thought Chutters might be in the dingy downstairs and deep down, we knew they were ok.

But we decided we needed to see whether we could turn the central heating on at some point tomorrow.

Follow the whole story here: Holiday to New England in Oct 2023