{"id":1512,"date":"2015-06-18T22:00:18","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T22:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/?p=1512"},"modified":"2018-09-07T03:21:05","modified_gmt":"2018-09-07T03:21:05","slug":"thursday-june-18-bar-harbor-mount-desert-area","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/06\/18\/thursday-june-18-bar-harbor-mount-desert-area\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, June 18 (Bar Harbor \/ Mount Desert area)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Another perfect vacation day! We headed out early in the morning for a
\nseries of small hikes. We started by driving back to Sand Beach in Acadia
\nNational Park, still one of our very favorite places in the park, because
\nRichard had told us that there was a trail directly to the left of it
\nheading up to a cliff\/promontory, Great Head. It was a fabulous hike,
\ncomplete with climbing around on the big chunks of granite that were part of\u00a0the cliff, looking at some tidal pools, and generally enjoying these
\nfabulous Maine views of ocean, forest, and granite cliffs all in the same
\narea. A lot of the trail was just up granite surfaces, and that was fun
\nclimbing. After that, we went to one more spot in the park that we wanted
\nto explore a little, Jordan Pond. We didn’t go on a real hike from there,
\nbut we wandered around a little and saw the lake and walked a few hundred
\nfeet on the famous carriage roads. There are miles and miles of these all
\nthrough the park, built by John D. Rockefeller in super high quality, and
\nalthough they’d be a perfectly fine gravel motor road anywhere else, they
\ndon’t allow any cars–very far-seeing of Rockefeller, who had these built in
\nthe early 1900s, up to the 1930s. You can ride bikes, have horses, and of
\ncourse walk, but they are about two car widths broad and really well
\nmaintained. We also saw one of the gatehouses that forms an “entrance” to
\nthe carriage house area, but I thought it was a bit goofy–built in perfect
\nimitation of French 16th-century tudor-framed houses in the 1930s.
\nRockefeller also had a thing about granite bridges over and under the
\ncarriage roads, and apparently no two are alike–we saw several, and they
\nare very pretty, blending into the landscape well. That was his goal–he
\nalso instituted the tradition of using big squarish blocks of granite, set a
\nfew feet apart from each other, as “guard rails” along the road–we learned
\nthat they are called “Rockefeller’s teeth” around here.<\/p>\n

We then left the park and had lunch in Northeast Harbor–at a cafe called
\nthe Colonel that had sold us the fabulous donut the day before. But their
\nlunch was pretty blah, and their homemade bread\/rolls were boring. So we
\nconsoled ourselves by buying another donut to share (even though the cost
\nmade me gulp–who has ever HEARD of a donut that costs $ 2.11 including
\ntax?). We then took a drive along the waterfront that we had seen from the
\nboat yesterday (Sergeant Drive) and headed to the fabulous public gardens in\u00a0town. There are two, an Asian-inspired azalea garden right across from the\u00a0Azicou Inn, where we had lunch the day before, and then another further up\u00a0the hill called Thuya Garden, which has all kinds of glorious plants (and 5\u00a0gardeners to keep it maintained). A 2-mile loop hike through forest took us\u00a0from the one to the other and back, and it was wonderful–better even than\u00a0the gardens themselves. Mark took a lot of plant pictures of some awesome\u00a0blooming flowers and bushes, and then we also got to visit the Thuya lodge. \u00a0This is the “cottage” (spacious, but not crazy–a couple of big rooms and a\u00a0kitchen downstairs, a couple more rooms upstairs, deliberately rustic but\u00a0with a huge library) where the original owner of this land, a man named\u00a0Curtis, lived. He was another trailblazer philanthropist in the area–who\u00a0decided that the non-wealthy regular folks in the area needed access to\u00a0hikes and cool views, as everything was bought up by the wealthy\u00a0vacationers. He built the lodge and landscaped the terraced land below and\u00a0above (where the garden now sits), but made sure the path up remained public\u00a0access. When he died (in the 20s), he left the land and the lodge to the\u00a0town, who wisely appointed a friend of his who was a landscaping architected\u00a0(and woodcarver) as a “steward.” That man in turn designed the gardens and\u00a0fine-tuned the terraces, which made for a fabulous path down out of the\u00a0garden with views of the harbor and many sit-down\/lookout spots. \u00a0Beautifully designed.<\/p>\n

Our last hiking stop was on the “quiet side” of the island, i.e. on the
\nwestern half–we drove to a dead-end parking lot below a hill called Beech
\nMountain (mountains are not very high here, but I guess it counts, because
\nyou can see so far). There was a steep 0.4 mile hike up to the fire tower
\non top, and another 0.7 hike back down, with more beautiful views of the
\nocean, the freshwater lakes on the inside of the island, and the forest in
\nbetween. A fun way to wrap up the hiking of the day! It was gloriously
\nsunny and in the 60s all day, so we were never too warm, but we did get a
\nbit grimy and sweaty, so we went to the motel to take showers and rest up a
\nbit. Then we drove to Richard and Lorraine’s house and had a simple dinner
\nwith them and Rebecca. The house is inland, but completely awesome–a
\nunique design by a very modern-minded architect, and with a very
\nScandinavian \/ space-saving design and a very steep-slope roof that prevents\u00a0snow and rain from staying on the roof, even without gutters of any sort. \u00a0There are two bedrooms and a big loft area with office and reading space,\u00a0and lots of light-colored wood and white paint. A bit much in terms of\u00a0knick-knacks everywhere, but the design is beautiful, as is the rock garden\u00a0outside–lots of granite, mostly there before they built there! R & L come\u00a0there multiple times a year between May and October, and are clearly very\u00a0happy to have this place for regular vacations. We talked over dessert and\u00a0coffee, and left at about 9:30. Because it was a clear night, we took a
\ndetour into the park and up to Cadillac Mountain to see the stars. But it
\nwas very windy and cold up there, so we only lasted a few minutes. We could
\nsee the stars above and the lights of the harbor towns below, but it was
\nspooky with the high winds, which actually blew entire CLOUDS of pine pollen\u00a0across the road–dense enough that we at first thought it was fog! It was a\u00a0great end to a wonderful day.<\/p>\n

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Another perfect vacation day! We headed out early in the morning for a series of small hikes. We started by driving back to Sand Beach in Acadia National Park, still one of our very favorite places in the park, because Richard had told us that there was a trail directly to the left of it … Continue reading “Thursday, June 18 (Bar Harbor \/ Mount Desert area)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roadtrip2015"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1528,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions\/1528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}