Bar Harbor

We had been warned about the fog and still it surprised us — rolling in off the Atlantic so thick one morning that the harbour boats became grey ghosts and the far shore vanished entirely. Lia loved it instantly. Bar Harbor in the mist felt like the edge of the known world, a huddle of clapboard and church spires clinging to the coast where Maine finally runs out of land. We had come, like everyone, for Acadia, but the town itself held us longer than we meant to stay, all cold air and woodsmoke and the smell of the sea at every corner.

The Bar and the Tides

The town takes its name from a bar — a natural gravel spit that emerges from the sea at low tide, linking Bar Harbor to a small forested island offshore. We timed our walk for the ebb and crossed the exposed sea floor with a scattering of others, picking over the wet stones and stranded seaweed, crabs scuttling in the tide pools. Bar Island at the far end is nothing much, a hump of spruce with a view back at the town, but the crossing itself is a small marvel — a road that exists only twice a day, on the ocean’s schedule rather than ours. Lia, who cannot resist a deadline, kept checking her watch; the tide gives you about ninety minutes before it swallows the path again.

Into Acadia

Acadia begins where the town ends, and we spent our days inside it. We drove the Park Loop Road in the early light, stopping at Thunder Hole where the surf slams into a cleft in the rock and booms like cannon fire, then at Sand Beach, tucked improbably between pink granite headlands. The great set-piece is Cadillac Mountain — the highest point on the eastern seaboard, and for part of the year the first place in the United States to catch the sunrise. We climbed it in the dark, coffee in gloved hands, and stood among a shivering crowd as the sun broke over the islands and set the whole cold sea alight. Nobody spoke. It was worth every lost hour of sleep.

Lobster, Popovers and Evening Light

Bar Harbor takes its lobster seriously, and so, quickly, did we. We ate it the honest way — at a dockside pound, a whole steamed lobster apiece, bibs on, cracking the shells with our hands while gulls plotted from the pilings. Another evening we drove out to Jordan Pond House inside the park for tea and popovers, those hollow golden puffs served with strawberry jam, the pond behind us still as glass beneath two round hills the locals call the Bubbles. In town the shops and ice-cream parlours stayed lit late into the northern dusk, and we walked the Shore Path along the water as the sky did that long slow Maine fade, pink into grey into a cold clear dark full of stars.

Getting There

Bar Harbor sits on Mount Desert Island, about an hour southeast of Bangor, which has the nearest airport with regular flights. From Portland it is a scenic three-hour drive up the coast; from Boston, closer to five. A small regional airport at Trenton, just off the island, handles seasonal flights. In summer the free Island Explorer buses run between the town, the park and the trailheads, which spares you the parking crush — but a car gives you the early Cadillac sunrise and the empty coast at dawn, and those are the hours worth having.