Bar Harbor

We were glad that we had allowed an extra day in Bar Harbor to explore, because there was a lot to see.  We began by driving through Acadia National Park, which shares Mount Desert Island with Bar Harbor.  This 27,000-acre park was preserved decades ago by many wealthy visionaries, including John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family.  It is a place that a person might spend an entire season, or an entire life, exploring, marked by rocky coasts and tall mountains and criss-crossing hiking trails, no less unique than the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.  We saw serene, rocky beaches like this one.

And quiet lakes like this one, where a person could sit all day and simply listen to the sound of his own breathing.  Or cast for trout.  Or write poetry.

 

Some of the old network of carriage roads built by Rockefeller still survives, and all of the old stone bridges that he had built, which this amateur stone mason gazed upon with respect.

In the center of the park is Cadillac Mountain, accessed by a road that winds round and round, upward in the morning fog, and from the summit of which an early-riser can supposedly watch the sun rise before anybody else in the United States.  It reminded me of Mt. Mitchell and Grandfather Mountain in our part of the country, stark and fog-swept.

The mountain is named after a unique Cadillac Mountain Granite found in this area, used in construction all along the Maine coast because it breaks in such perfect lines.  This rock mason could not resist taking a sample home from an inconspicuous area nearby.

The afternoon was spent in Bar Harbor.  Signs in the local shops: "Ba-Ha-Ba."  Martha explored the shopping area while I walked along the Shore Path, which had turned bitterly cold in a strong gale off the water.  I snapped a photo of the famous "Balance Rock" on this path along Frenchman Bay.

And I marveled at the huge "summer homes" that the wealthy had built here decades ago during the Gilded Age.  This would be a nice, cool place to spend the summer if you were a Rockefeller; long multi-million-dollar lawns lazily reaching down to the bay, private tennis courts.

We rewarded ourselves with dinner, at the end of a long day, back in the Atlantic Oceanside at the "Bistro on Eden."  And our first taste of that iconic Maine lobster.