Journey's end (for now...)

We must begin with an apology to you, our faithful readers, for leaving you hanging for so long while we enjoyed the beauty and the wonders of Acadia National Park and Mt. Desert Island. In our defense, we attempted to post an update saying we had arrived, but we seem to have failed to upload it properly. Then we didn't think about it again for a while.

In summary, we spent a pleasant, foggy day biking from Belfast (where our last post left off) to Acadia National Park where we camped for our first of three nights. We stopped to look at a cool suspension bridge along the way and saw some fields of Maine's well-known wild blueberries.

View leaving Belfast

Bridge leaving Belfast

Suspension bridge

Field of wild blueberries

The next morning the sun was shining, and we saw the mountiantops and vistas of the park for the first time, and they were beautiful.

As a side-note, the park and Bar Harbor are situated on Mt. Desert Island, and the reason for that name is uncertain. The two theories we heard were (a) the Frenchmen who came way back thought the place was beautiful and named it "Mont Désir," which later got pronounced "Mount Desert" or (b) the Frenchmen saw how the mountaintops were rocky and not tree-covered like a desert, so they called it "Mont Desert." Either way, it was the French. And it was beautiful.

We got to see a nice vista of the island and some of the smaller islands surrounding it from the top of Cadillac Mountain (also named after a Frenchman) when we climbed it to watch the sun rise. The sun rose at 6:00am, and Cadillac mountain is the first place on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard to see the sunrise. That was cool.

We also went swimming at "Sand Beach," a beach that had sand (go figure). Most beaches in the area are quite rocky. We only swam for a few minutes or less, because the water felt like it came out of a refrigerator.

Sand Beach

We thought it was really cool that you could get pretty much anywhere in the park on the free shuttle system sponsored by L.L. Bean (a Maine-based company). And we could bring our bikes on it! We also like the fact that the park roads were very bicycle-friendly anyway, and there was also a 50-mile network of "carriage paths" constructed by the Rockefellers when they lived there. These paths were accessible by bikers and walkers and were quite scenic. They also had some really cool stone bridges!

Another highlight was hiking out to Bar Island, and island in the harbor accessible only at low tide. Twice a day, the low tide exposes a sandbar that you can walk across onto the uninhabited island.

Also, I ate a lobster.

For our last night, we stayed at a bed and breakfast called Aysgarth Station. We took a bike ride in the park the next morning then rode to Bangor to stay the night before picking up a rental car. While we were there, we say Paul Bunyan and stayed with a really kind host who we never met (except through Warm Showers community) and who lived in a cool house near Bangor that he lent to us for the night.

Morning bike ride

Paul and Katelyn

Before making it home, we drove our rental car to Pittsburgh, Katelyn attended a conference for biking and walking professionals, we hung out with out wonderful friends David and Jo, and we took Amtrak back to Atlanta via D.C. (and ate lunch on the national mall with Carmie's dad!). It was indeed an excellent adventure.

Rental car

Pittsburgh had cool bike trails!

And cool bridges!

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