Maine 1

FREEPORT

First stop in Maine was LL Bean, in Freeport.  And they even have my size in shoes!

The campus of the LL Bean Flagship Store:  A building for hunting a building for home decor, a building for kayaking, a building for cycling, a building for clothes / camping / everything else and a pavilion for concerts in the center.

I could not decide which $75k – $79k scattergun to take home…

BAR HARBOR – ACADIA NATIONAL PARK

We spent four days in and around Bar Harbor, Northeast Harbor and Acadia National Park, on Mount Desert Island.  There were tremendous bicycle trails, hiking trails and mountain climbing opportunities, along with kayaking and motor boating in the waterways, which were everywhere.

We stopped at a small place and had lunch, Cathy wanted a lobster roll.  I went out on a limb again and had the fish and chips.  This was the view from the restaurant…

It was cloudy and beginning to rain so we took Sargent Drive to get a view of Somes Sound…

This is a natural gathering of rocks called the “Seawall”…

When we got to the lighthouse, it was raining and windy.  This station was established in 1858 at a cost (building and land) of about $5,000.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. constructed 45 miles of Carriage Roads to allow guests and travelers to explore the mountains and valleys of Mount Desert Island. Rockefeller was a skilled horseman but wanted to be able to travel on motor-free byways via horse and carriage into the heart of the island.  There are two of these “Gate Lodges” on the trail. We hiked the trail from Lower Hadlock Pond and Upper Hadlock Pond and started about a half mile before this gate.  Once we reached the Upper Pond, we returned via a different course, around a small mountain, a distance of about five miles.

I chose the route because it enabled us to cross three of these full width, handcrafted bridges.  There are 17 of these bridges on the total series of roads and we were able to cross three on this particular hike.  Each bridge is unique in design and the construction was supervised by Rockefeller personally.  The trails were amazing, with large coping stones used as guard rails on the steeper slopes, cedar signposts installed at intersections to direct the carriage drivers, architecturally designed roadside grooming and landscaping, the impressive gate house structures and of course, the bridges.

The surface of the roadways were state of the art for the time –  broken stone roadbed, 16 feet wide. They were engineered to withstand the wet weather of Maine.

This was a very large fungi growth I spotted on a tree, a hundred feet or so off of the roadway.  It took a while to get down to take a photo and I had to scramble to catch Cathy as she continue walking. I put my GPS on the fungi to show the size.

After the hike, the weather began to slowly clear so we continued to drive through the park.  This is the boat harbor at the village of Northeast Harbor.

A couple of random ponds, there were many in the park…

Cathy on the dock, near the boat ramp at Northeast Harbor…

Seal Harbor on Mount Desert Island.