Acadia National Park (Maine) – Part I

After hearing about Andrew’s mom and sister’s trip out to the northeast we knew we had to add it to our travel list. This trip was mostly to experience Acadia National Park, but based on flights and timing we decided to also check out Portland, ME while we were out there. After some preliminary research, it didn’t take us long to decide to make the trip in the fall for weather and crowd reasons. And since it was so convenient we decided to time it with our anniversary as well., so we were out there for about a week at the end of September. Since we were planning to do mostly outdoorsy activities, to save some money we decided to camp for two nights. On this trip we hiked, we biked, we ate, and we did all the typical touristy things.

Wednesday September 25 –

Portland, ME

Travel wise everything went fairly smoothly. Nothing to report from our flights, although the rental car line for Avis/Budget was not to be reckoned with (if the price difference isn’t much, consider paying for the upcharge!) I felt a little bad cutting the 50 plus line of people thanks to Andrew’s Avis preferred status, but only a little bad, because I was ready to get our vacation started! We checked into our cute Airbnb on the East Promenade around 2:30pm. We were staying in the spare bedroom of a cute little town house owned by some very artsy people with 2 adorable dogs that sadly, took very little interest in us. After dropping off our luggage we made a beeline for some food. We decided to check out Belleville, a small French bakery/cafe with fancy pizzas (I had rosemary fig). The cafe was located right across from the observatory. It was a short walk away from our lodging, and just what we needed to get us through the afternoon.

Because we’re cheap, we decided to skip actually going up the observatory (I think it was like $10/person) so who knows if we missed out on an excellent opportunity. We instead started making our way to the north side of the Eastern Promenade so that we could walk along the coast on our way back. Aside from the smells right by the water treatment plant, it was a very pleasant walk. Being from the middle of the country we don’t get to see the ocean very often, so it was a nice change of scenery. We continued walking along the coast all the way around the peninsula over to Old Port which is around when we started getting tired. So we decided to make a pit stop at Shipyard Brewery for some deserved beer flights (although their soda flight options were a nice touch for any NA people out there). Because we were on vacation I decided we needed a dessert as well, so we walked over to Two Fat Cats and chose ourselves a Whoopie Pie to share, which coincidentally we later learned that Whoopie Pie’s are the official Maine treat – so go us! Finally we decided we needed to head back to the Airbnb. The walk ended up being about 3.5miles all said and done.

After a much needed nap, we made our way to downtown Portland in our rental car. We walked around a little, and then had dinner at a restaurant called Green Elephant recommended by a friend. It was basically a vegetarian Asian place, and it was so good. I had the Panang Curry and Andrew had a Green Tea Noodle Soup. (Sadly we were too hungry, so we were halfway through our meals before I thought to take a picture!).

Thursday September 26 –

Our Anniversary

When our hosts recommended a coffee shop/bakery called Tandem Coffee there was no way we couldn’t go, so after rubbing the sleep out of our eyes we made our way over there for coffee and pastries. They even had free stickers, so you know we grabbed one so we could add it to our tandem!

Today we were making our way up to Acadia; this is a 3 hour drive if you are in a point A to point B mood, but we decided we would meander our way up and check out some random attractions along the way. Our first stop, was to see Eartha, the world’s largest revolving globe. It was big, it was cool, and we spent a surprisingly long amount of time staring at it as it slowly spun around. It’s located inside one of Garmin’s branch offices, so make sure you go during normal weekday business hours if you want to actually go inside.

Pastries and Coffee from Tandem Coffee in Portland

Pro tip, when searching for food in cities in Maine, make sure you include “Maine” in your search; I was disappointed to learn that there were not an abundance of Irish pubs in Belfast, Maine as I had thought upon an original search of “food in Belfast”. So instead of Irish fare, for lunch we stopped at Chase’s Daily in Belfast. The restaurant was unique (to us at least), it was like a farmers market with fresh produce, but also a like pre-prepared food you could order to eat. We walked around the town a little, and found some converted lobster cage chairs near the docks for us to sit in and enjoy the ambiance.

The last detour was to stop at the Penobscot Narrows Bridge where you can go up the tower and get a 360 view of the landscape surrounding it. (This activity was for the reasonable price of $8/person, and so worth it, even if it was a little too sunny to get a good picture when we went up.) The ticket also included access to the Fort nearby, but it was getting late, and we wanted to make it to the visitor center before they closed, and our campsite before it rained, so we skipped the fort.

Getting into the park was really easy, all over the internet people complain about crowds, but there were no lines for us to wait in. We were able to get our passes, get to our campsite, Blackwoods Campground, and get set up with no trouble at all. There was rain in the forecast, and it had held out thus far, so we decided to risk it and take a short hike to the ocean, and then over to the famous thunder hole. It was nice to stretch our legs and catch some views before nightfall set in.

Since it was our anniversary, I had made dinner reservations for us at the Burning Tree restaurant, which was conveniently a 5 minute drive from our campground (3 of those minutes being dedicated to getting out of the campground). The restaurant demographic was comically all old white people with us and like one other young couple. But I guess the retirees have good taste, because we were very pleased with our food choices, and being a day of celebration, we also enjoyed ourselves a fancy jumbo coconut macaroon with lemon sorbet!

Sadly, the rain had rolled in while we were at the restaurant. By the time we got to our tent, there was a nice puddle that our tent was sitting in, I guess from all the rain runoff off of our rain fly. It was too late to do anything about the ½” deep and still growing puddle so we climbed in and hoped for the best. We did survive the night staying pretty dry thanks to our sleeping pads, but the base of our tent and anything we hadn’t stuffed in our sleeping bags with us was not so lucky. Guess we need to look up tips for how to not have the water pool around our tent like that. (and yes the campsite was flat).

Thunder Hole in the evening (the lower portion was closed off)

Food from the Burning Tree for our anniversary

Jumbo macaroon from the Burning Tree for our anniversary

Friday September 27 –

Cadillac Mountain

We woke up really early Friday so that we could drive up to the top of Cadillac Mountain for sunrise. We were under prepared for the cold, but the views were absolutely spectacular. So us, and about 100 other people who joined us at the mountain top were the first people to see the sunrise in the US that day. After the sun was fully over the horizon we made our way back to the campsite where we decided to try something new – scrambled eggs. Andrew made them from egg beaters, and added onions and peppers. While the eggs were decent enough, the cleanup afterwards was so not worth it, so we’ll have to experiment more to try and find some other easy non-oatmeal breakfast options. (Feel free to share any suggestions!)

Once the sun was all the way up and it had warmed up a little, it was time to actually hike up Cadillac Mountain. We took the South ridge trail which basically started right at our campsite, so that was super convenient. The hike was very pleasant with a variety of scenery. There were a few people we saw hiking the trail with us, but it was for the most part pretty empty. We could tell when we getting close to the summit because of all the people walking along the trail from the top. It was almost comical how many tourists were at the top after our 4 mile hike in near solitude. The hardest part of the hike was going back down. (Sadly the park shuttle doesn’t go to the top, and we weren’t really wanting to ask strangers for a lift down). There are several different trails to the summit so we arbitrarily chose a different shorter route down, “the Gorge Trail”. The problem with mountain hikes is that shorter means steeper, and the gorge trail lived up to its namesake. My knees were not happy with our choice and I was getting tired (we probably should have trained more), so I wasn’t enjoying the scenery as much on the way down, and those last 3 miles just seemed to last forever. We poked out at Sieur de Monts Spring, which ironically had little nature gardens and a boardwalk trail where people could get a smattering of all the plant/wildlife one might find on a hike, you know all that stuff we had been experiencing for the past 6 hours.

We decided to catch the shuttle into the town of Bar Harbor where we treated ourselves to some much deserved ice cream. We were too tired to do much of anything else, so we found some benches along the coast and just chilled there for a while before catching the island shuttle back to our campgrounds. Because the weather had been sunny and warm our campsite had dried out pretty well. Other than the dried mud on the rain fly the tent and gear was dry and clean enough that you wouldn’t have known that we slept in a puddle the night before. We ended the day with some rice and beans and played some cards before crashing for the night.