The three-hour drive northeast takes us through the windjammer resorts of Boothbay Harbor, Camden and Rockland, and past Freeport, home of L. Our routine is to rent a car at the city's diminutive airport and head north to Acadia along Route 1 _ for the most part, a pretty coastal span that can get crowded on weekends. While the closest airports are in Bar Harbor (a five-minute drive from the park) and Bangor (an hour away), we prefer to fly into Portland, about three hours south.Ī mini-San Francisco, Portland is surrounded on three sides by the deep blue sea. Getting to Acadia really is half the fun. The throngs drive the 22-mile Park Loop Road, taking in the mountain, lake and sea views from open windows and leaving the wilds to the rusticators _ as locals call everyone from a weekend woods-walker to a mountain biker. Many of the inns and restaurants close by the end of October, but for those two precious months between Labor Day and Halloween, Acadia is both full-service and untrammeled.Įven in high season, however, the 120 miles of hiking trails never seem crowded. In summer, the boutiques, cafes and bed-and-breakfast inns of tony little Bar Harbor (the base for most Acadia visitors) and the cheap motels and steamy lobster stands along the route to town draw millions of tourists _ "people from away," as Maine folks call anyone not from the Pine Tree State and even some natives short on ancestral roots here.īut come September, the visitors are gone. The ride through the woods and under the bridges is splendidly serene. There are 13 handcut- stone bridges over the paths. Today, commercial carriage rides are available, but the paths mainly are used by walkers and cyclists, who appreciate the gradual slopes. Rockefeller later donated one-third of the land for the national park, including his carriage trails. He laid out $2-million for these horse-and-buggy paths and made them available to his friends, who spent summers in the region seeking Maine's sensual solitude. Rockefeller Jr., reportedly because he was outraged by the introduction of the tranquility-shattering automobile in 1915. Weaving though the park are 51 miles of gravel carriage trails built at the beginning of the century by John D. Its proximity to the eastern seaboard's megalopolis attracts millions of tourists annually. Acadia is one of the nation's Acadia is one of the nation's smallest national parks but its compactness makes it all the more accessible.
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