Skip to main content

Back in Bar Harbor


When you're away from home for so long and have little in the way of scheduled commitments, knowing the day or date largely becomes irrelevant. Even holidays seem unimportant. I should have paid more attention.

Egg Rock Lighthouse at sunrise
At our shipboard briefing  before landing in Bar Harbor Tuesday we were told that, in addition to the optional excursion, we could hop on the Island Explorer bus system emanating from the Village Green, which I use during my regular summer visits, to reach all points on Mount Desert Island. My plan was to bus to one of my favorite spots for watching the tide come and go. But the buses stop running immediately after the Columbus Day weekend, the "official" end of the season in Bar Harbor.

If only I had remembered that the Columbus Day weekend was last weekend, not next. My plan to visit my favorite rock and tide pool fizzled when I walked up from the waterfront to the Village Green and saw none of the propane-fueled buses with the L.L. Bean logo, which underwrites the service.

I could hire a taxi or Uber, but none were to be found: passengers from the largest vessel scheduled to call Bar Harbor this year, the Norwegian Escape with 4,270 berths, commandeered the town's limited car services, with another liner (Seabourn Quest, 450 berths) also in port. Of course, all these visitors made the merchants very happy, making the corner of Main and Cottage streets seem like Times Square; autumn's colorful maples and oaks in New England, even on an island where conifers dominate, make for thousands of leaf-peepers.

I wasn't prepared for an 11-mile round trip walk to my favorite spot near Otter Point. So I called Paul Woodfin, who with wife Mary owns Snell House where I've stayed whenever visiting Bar Harbor for the past 15 years. He took time for his day to drive me to my special spot, then picked me up to get me back to town. Many thanks, Paul!

I had sufficient time after Paul dropped me off to stop by the Thirsty Whale, which serves the best fried clams on Mount Desert Island. That, an Allagash White and three hours spent at my favorite place in the world made for a perfect day.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Newport: Memory of Childhood

To most the city of Newport, Rhode Island, is associated with the Gilded Age mansions lining Ocean Avenue and the Cliff Walk. For me it's the Awful Awful. The Awful Awful is a thick milkshake, but instead of being made from ice cream, milk and syrup, most of its dairy content comes from ice milk. It originated at Bond's, a northern New Jersey ice cream chain with an outpost in my home town, Elizabeth. It got it's name because it's "Awful Big, Awful Good". Drink three and get your name inscribed on the wall, plus a fourth for free. Two ice cream chains in New England took notice of the thick shake and bought rights to market it under the Awful Awful name anywhere but in Bond's home territory of the Garden State. But when one of them starting expanding, not being able to enter the New Jersey market was a major impediment, so they changed the name to Fribble. That's what the chain -- Friendly's -- continues to call its shake, though it&#
Post a Comment
Read more

Into the Bay, Up the River

The Fram's observation deck at night. The 'H' is for Hurtigruten A day of rain, with enough wind to make it biting, greeted us as we anchored in Rockland, Maine Thursday. Too nasty for me, even though I planned to revisit the Farnsworth Museum and its extensive collection of Wyeths, along with Chlde Hassam, Maurice Prendergast, Thomas Eakins and Louise Nevelson, among other American artists and sculptors. It's only a slight detour from my regular route to Bar Harbor each summer, so I'll return on another occasion. After taking on a pilot in mid-afternoon we sailed Penobscot Bay to its namesake river, passing under the Penobscot Narrows bridge (pictured above), a cable-stayed span which replaced a 1931 suspension bridge I crossed many times en route to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We anchored in the Penobscot River early in the evening a short tender ride from Bucksport, where we spent the morning and early afternoon Friday without rain or much w
Post a Comment
Read more