We slept pretty well last night after our wimp-tiring long drive here. We woke up late, took showers, made a big breakfast and then popped into Charlotte for our first Mt. Acadia foray. We got started down Hwy 3 towards Bar Harbor, which is pronounced “BahHAHbuh” by the locals. The road is a nice drive through some wooded areas with little quaint motels alongside the highway. There are several lobster places in case you ever get hungry passing along this stretch of road. The entrance to Mt. Acadia NP is in Hull’s Cove, right before you get into Bar Harbor. We took the Mt. Acadia turn and arrived initially at a visitor center parking lot where every parking space seemed to be filled with cars pointing in all directions. We bravely chickened out and went directly for the loop road.
Despite our initial, ultimately correct selection of the loop road as our route, we stupidly decided on an alternate plan that would allow us to drive into Bar Harbor to drop off an envelope at the post office so the letter could be postmarked as originating in BahHAHbuh and arriving at Peg’s sister’s house with the spiffy postmark. We were idiots. Straying from an original, perfectly sound plan to engage in a whim is not the recipe for success.
We arrived on the very first street in town and were immediately trapped within a one-way grid that has streets entering some blocks as two-way and emerging on the other end as one-way. The roads are very narrow and there are places where you go in but don’t come out. Alongside the substandard sized streets are myriad businesses which sell cleverly-packaged Chinese-made official Maine and Mt. Desert Island curios and souvenirs to the tourists who are not busy clogging the miserable streets with mindless, almost zombie-like meanderings within the traffic non-flow. Even the U.S. Post Office Building downtown has a drive-up U.S. Mail drop box that can only be approached by official USPS vehicles maybe due to the very-real concern that ISIS might blow up a lobster house or post office.
After some spirited discussions about whose fault it was that we were trapped in Hell, we found a road that exited town and we returned to the Mt. Acadia NP loop road vowing never to return to Bar Harbor, at least in the summer. Once back on the loop road, we ascended to the top of Cadillac Mountain, the highest point in Mt. Acadia and maybe all of Maine. This place has absolutely magnificent views 360 degrees around and the surrounding vistas of islands, forests, rocky shorelines, the sea and inland lakes is stunning. Parking, however, is not too available because of the volume of visitors so we ended up parking in a lot about 300 yards from the top where we ate fruit and nuts and marveled at the views. Weather was very cooperative.
Descending Cadillac Mountain, we again picked up the loop road around the east half of the island except where we strayed onto roads that would allow us to skirt the coastline. There are some short sections of sandy beach but I think the most spectacular sections of this place’s coastline is those parts where the multi-colored granite cliffs drop directly into the sea. There are gorgeous stone arch bridges you pass over and under strewn about the roads and most of the roads out here were either one-way loop or uninhabited two-lane blacktop routes to nifty little communities, coves and hidden harbors. There must be a big boating crowd because there are a shitload of boats tied to buoys around the entire island, most of them in little coves with less than 50 boats. Most of the pleasure boats appear to be made of wood and quite pretty. Lots of lobster fishermen are tied up at the spaces in between the nice tourist cruisers. Not a lot of big, ostentatious mega-yachts were noted; mostly just well-made (and I imagine very tough) wood pleasure boats 30 feet or less.
We tried a different lobster joint today called Lunt’s Lobster Pound where Peg got a lobster roll and I went with fried clams and a haddock sandwich. The bill was a bit smaller than the Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound but it should have been. The food was certainly nominal but we liked the other joint better.
Just a little travel tidbit here – we started our trip in Charlotte Taylor Wilson, our truck, towing the Barbarian Invader, our fifth wheel trailer, 53 weeks ago. We seem to enjoy it more every day and hope to continue until we can’t do it anymore. We had no idea whether or not we would like this lifestyle when we started this back in June, 2014. Strangely, both Peg and I have found this form of retirement very relaxing and great fun. It is not too expensive if you can keep the camping costs down and we have both seen bucket list grade stuff almost to the point where it is overwhelming. We have been fortunate enough to enjoy the different treasures in 25 states and the District of Columbia in the last year. If we continue according to our extremely hazy projections for the next 5 months, we will visit 14 more states before we return to our home in San Diego for some RV maintenance. This has been great fun so far and we don’t foresee a downturn unless one of us gets real sick or craps out. I hope we get quite a bit more of this because it is terrific.