If you travel northeast along the incredibly ragged (and incredibly beautiful) coast of Maine, when you've covered a little more than half of the linear [not the fractal] distance, you're in Downeast.And the jewel of this region is Acadia National Park, the oldest park east of the Mississippi, and one of the highlights that we'd put on our list early in our trip planning.
Covering most of the area of Mount Desert Island, the Park did not disappoint in its views, trails, or interesting history. Being an older park, it's not surprising that it includes such inholdings as the amazing house you can see in the background of the photo on the left, taken near Thunder Hole. And the famous town of Bar Harbor (or Bah Hahbah, as you just have to say it up there) is also on the island.
I'll have pictures of this charming town, and some other sites on the island in my next posts, but today I'm concentrating on the Park.
And what a setting for a park! The view above was taken from the top of Cadillac Mountain, which, at 1,530 feet, is not much of a mountain by Colorado standards. But it's the highest mountain on the eastern seaboard, and affords views that make you wonder if it and Colorado's peaks are on the same planet, not to mention in the same country.Here's what the mountain-top itself looks like, strangely very similar in type of rock to our own Enchanted Rock, it seemed to me, in spite of the very un-Texas-like watery setting:
Coming from the dry southwest, we thought it was amusing that the French named this island Mont Desert, since it doesn't resemble the deserts we're familiar with. But you can see by the photo above that there are wide stretches of bare rock, which, in this part of the country, looks like desert by comparison to the surrounding forests.Those islands in Frenchman Bay are the real scenic attractions from the top of the mountain, looking like chunks of rocks dropped in a very wide stream:
A few of the islands of the southern coast of Mount Desert (not in the Bay) were of particular interest to us:
In the picture below, where I zoomed in, I've marked Great Cranberry Island, where we'd be heading in a few days. [Unfortunately, my telephoto capability isn't robust enough to show our GCI hostess waving, as she said she was doing when I called her from the Mountain and told her we could see her island.]
There will be photos and descriptions of this magical place coming in a few days if I can keep to my current blogging schedule.
After our Cadillac Mountain excursion we continued along the Park Loop Road, unfortunately not having time to stop at every scenic spot.
We chose to make Thunder Hole our next out-of-car experience, and enjoyed the rocky coast there:
...although the eponymous hole wasn't much to see, especially since the walkway that would have put you close to it was closed off. (And Oahu's Blowhole (which you can see toward the bottom of this page) was a bit more impressive.)But that coast is still lovely...
We did some inland rambling, too.First, a stop at Eagle Lake, since the more popular and historically significant Jordan Pond was really crowded.
The lake was enjoyable not only for wider views, but for the micro-scenery that's sometimes easy to miss when you're surrounded by amazing panoramas. Like these muscular-looking tadpoles in the shallows:
Our next day in Acadia, on the way to catch the ferry to Great Cranberry, we took time out for a short hike by another lake, Upper Hadlock Pond. Which is not on the main loop road and consequently not nearly as crowded.
Regarding the crowds, considering that Acadia is in the east, and it's summer, they really weren't all that bad. And especially being off the main road, we had this pretty little lakeshore almost all to ourselves.
Hard as it is for Texans to believe, since we've been sweltering for some time, summer has really just started around here. You can tell by the lovely new growth on the ends of the spruce branches that we saw on the trail:
A highlight of our walk was an Acadia landmark that we wished we had more time to explore, the carriage road you can see below. In the photo it's laid over a small creek on a very handsome stone bridge, one of many in the Park. [We were supposed to attend a ranger's talk about the roads one morning, but faulty navigating made us too late to catch it. 
] J.D. Rockefeller, previous owner of the parkland, apparently built a whole system of these roads so that he could have quiet carriage rides, after other Mount Desert roads were opened to motorized transport! Now they are favorites of bikers and hikers not needing rougher terrain to enjoy the wilds.
Sibling trip! Sister & brother on the bridgeI took lots more pictures than just these in Acadia. You can see the others in this Flickr set. And I'll try and write up more about Downeast Maine in the next day or two.
Photos from the whole trip (including many not used in the blog posts) are in this Flickr collection.
