August 28, 2003
Ah, the Maine coast
Five days in Maine. Wow, what a great trip. Chris and I headed up to Bar Harbor last Saturday for a four day vacation.
Our crack-of-dawn flight out of DCA, through Boston and into Portland was delightfully uneventful. The car trip up along route 1, with it's requisite stop in Freeport, yielded that elusive pair of shoes I've been seeking. Not to mention an excellent lunch dockside in Portland. Mmmm, lobster!
The following three days in Bar Harbor, staying at Cleftstone Manor, were wonderful. The weather was excellent. Sunday night found us at the Criterion theatre for a show by none other than Suzanne Vega. The show was great, the art deco interior of the theatre even better. It's so nice to see a place not yet molested into becoming a gigaplex. Although those seats just aren't intended for someone over 6 feet tall.
No trip to the Gulf of Maine would be complete without whale watching. We were delighted to see several fin and humpback whales along with a pod of nearly 200 harbor porpoise. Quite a sight! We chose the Hellen H. for it's smaller size. Larger and more modern vessels exist but they seemed to have a lot more people on board. Bigger boats usually come with the hassles of more people jockeying for elbow room. The crowd on our boat was just right.
Acadia Bicycles rented us a fine pair of mountain bikes. We managed to get two rides around Jordan Pond and Eagle Lake into our busy schedule. The dinner at the Jordan Pond house was excellent and a great follow-on to a quick hour ride around the carriage trails. Acadia national park has quite a few carriage trails and they're a nice alternative to riding the regular roads. They're not as point-to-point as the hiking trails (which prohibit bikes) but their gravel roadway makes for an easy ride. Road bike tires won't cut it but a hybrid could get by.
The hiking trails up to Gorham Mountain had lots of rocks. No simple gravel paths here. Be prepared for a lot of careful picking of your footing. The trip up was pretty easy, the trips down took a fair amount of patience as the rocky nature of the paths made for tricky going. We were cautioned not to try taking the Beehive trail back down. In looking at it from below we can see why. It's hard enough going back down paths intended for walking. One with rungs and ladders would have been a lot of work to descend. The free shuttle buses are great. After several hours hiking rocky trails the walk back along the roadside ocean trail wasn't worth bothering so we caught a bus back to our starting point.
Anyone out there a lobster fan? Chris sure is and I'm not known to pass on it when it's on the menu. After four days of having at least some form of lobster for lunch and/or dinner we can say we've had our fill for a while. Suffice to say the folks up there sure do know how to make a good seafood chowder. The stuff we get around here just pales in comparison.
I've never been a big fan of blueberries but Maine's wild variety are really tasty. There's nothing like stopping trail-side and picking a few handfuls. It was our luck to be visiting just when they're ripe for picking. The mountain top trails were just full of them. You can get all sorts of blueberry-flavored things. My favorite turned out to be Blueberry Ale. A nice medium brew with just a hint of blueberry. Although the Cadillac Mountain Stout was mighty tasty as well. Chris liked the Lobster Ale but it's Bass-like taste just wasn't what I was after. The pound of blueberry-flavored coffee we brought home is already half gone!
Next time we're going to try flying into Bangor or the Bar Harbor airport. The drive up from Portland was nice but other than stopping at the outlets in Freeport there's not much we ended up seeing. It is a nice drive and all but I'm not sure it's worth the time. The trip back up through Bangor and down I-95 was much faster; around 3 hours instead of the five it took up Route 1. We'd still need to rent a car on the island so it certainly won't save us any money to fly closer. The travel time could have been spent on the island and that'd be worth the price. Although a ferry ride out from Portland to Yarmouth and then back into Bar Harbor might work. Either that or fly into Yarmouth, see Prince Edward Island and then ferry back into Bar Harbor. Maybe we'll do that next time around.
All in all it was a wonderful trip.
Getting back into town was another matter. Tuesday's thunderstorms knocked out the power twice. The house was dark when we got home and power didn't come back until 3 am. Five days without being online was enough, having to go 12 hours longer was a bit annoying. There's 2300+ messages in my inboxes (only 300 of which were spam). It'll be weeks before I catch up! That and now my main linux box seems to have eaten it's boot drive. ...sigh...
