We’re heading up to visit our daughter in central Vermont tomorrow. After a few days there, we’re driving over to Acadia National Park (we got an AirBnB a bit further away than ideal, maybe 25 miles or so).
It’s a 6-ish hour drive - anything interesting we need to see en route?
What about at / near Acadia? I can’t do a lot of hiking (recent broken toe) but am ambulatory.
24ish hours in Portland on the way back, then the long drive home. I may visit Soakology (foot spa) in Portland; we once did a lighthouse boat tour there also. On previous visits we’ve just had a few hours to spend - so we might like to get a bit beyond the few blocks from the touristy waterfront to the “downtown” area.
In Acadia: If you want to drive up Cadillac Mountain for the sunrise you now need reservations, so get those in advance. Popovers at the Jordon Pond House are a must. My personal favorite lobster pound is Beal’s in Southwest Harbor, but Abel’s is good too. Can you bike? The carriage roads are wonderful and fairly easy to negotiate. A sunset sail out of Bar Harbor is nice, and there are nice boat tours of the various sounds and islands that are great on a nice day.
The quickest drive to Acadia (depending on exactly where you’re starting) is down to Manchester NH then to the seacoast and up 95. If you’re doing that, take the coastal route from Brunswick (Rt 1) and stop at Red’s Eats in Damariscotta for a lobster roll. It’s a bit slower route but much more scenic.
The more northern route (Rt 2, Gorham, Bethel, August) is fine, but not a huge amount to do along the way. What kind of stops would you like to do?
Fun story: I went up to Acadia and Cadillac Mt with some friends a couple of years back. We had just started up Cadillac Mt when it started to snow. There were a few cars going down the other way, but we just kept going to the top anyways. It was almost closing time and we just wanted to go up to the top and back down, but when we came back down, the gate was shut. We called the ranger station but no one answered. Eventually we ended up calling the local police, who contacted the rangers, who came and let us out. Turns out they had shut the gate early because of the snow and didn’t think anyone else was up there. We had somehow snuck in between them checking for people and closing the gate.
Other than Cadillac Mt, the other obligatory thing you must do there is visit the “Thunder Hole.”
@Telemark hit some of the good things to do in Acadia. There’s also a great boat trip in Bass Harbor called Island Cruises – they take you around the various islands, talk about the history, and bring up a couple of lobster traps so you can see how that’s done. Bass Harbor is close to Southwest Harbor, so you could do the boat trip and then Beal’s. There are also some good ocean kayaking trips in Bar Harbor, if you’re able to do that.
Can you ride a bike with the broken toe? If so, they now have electric-assist bikes for rent, which would be great for tooling around the carriage trails.
I would say to skip any whale watching boat trips – they are very long, and you only get to see the back of whales. I’ve done the sunset sail on the Margaret Todd and it was lovely.
For the en route part, Freeport is pretty cool, and they have the main LL Bean store there – it used to be open 24/7, but I’m not sure that’s still the case with the pandemic.
Close to Acadia is the Timber Tina lumberjack show, which is geared a bit towards kids, but is still fun.
It’s so beautiful there. If you tell us what you like to do, we can probably make even more recommendations.
ETA: Regarding Thunder Hole, you have to time it right with the tides.
The broken toe is unlikely to be an issue with bike riding - but I learned nearly 30 years ago that 15 minutes on a bike meant 3 weeks of painful knees - waaaah!
We’ll definitely look over the suggestions for things to do. Current plan is to leave Vermont late morning on Tuesday - we’ll be in Rutland then - and take some kind of scenic route toward the coast. We’ll deliberately avoid interstates when possible.
Good idea to skip the whale watching tours - we did one 4 years ago in Quebec and saw some belugas and the spout from some other sort, otherwise it was a 2 hour bus ride, 3 hours on a boat and another 2 hour bus ride. I don’t regret it, but it’s no longer on my bucket list.
The whales you see off of Maine are the kind that barely get their backs out of the water. I have about 100 pictures of the back of the whale, and I think it was like a 5 hour trip.
Now, if you’re in Alaska or Hawaii, depending on the season, you get to see humpback whales – very dramatic!
You have to have some Allen’s Coffee Brandy. Like getting a lobster roll and a Moxie, it’s obligatory. It’s not as awful as people will tell you it is. It’s basically just cold, sweet, black coffee with booze in it. I liked it better than the Moxie, I’ll tell you that much.
To me, the mos interesting in Maine is Mainers, old timers. Go to tag sales
(yard sales) and talk to people. And notice farm architecture, with all buildings attached together by the corners.
On a trip there several years ago I noticed that while a lobster dinner cost about the same as in Kansas City (say $25), most places offered a two-lobster dinner for $28. My kinda deal!
Quick update
We spent the first few days visiting our daughter in Rutland, VT and helping her get her apartment organized. We then headed over to Maine - with a stop at Mount Washington as my husband had not been up the cog railway.
We wound up staying at an AirBnB in Bucksport, ME - kind of in the middle of nowhere, but about a 10 minute drive from the waterfront (saw a cruise ship one day, and a tall ship another), and spent 2 days going to Acadia - one afternoon doing the tour bus, then the next driving to places we wanted to spend more time visiting. We walked down to Sand Beach - too cold to swim but we dipped our feet in the water. My husband walked down to see the Thunder Hole; I passed as my feet were hurting, which I regret. One dinner in Bar Harbor; planned on it the second day as well but it was pouring so we drove back to Bucksport for a meal instead.
We wanted to spend a day in Portland but the remnants of Hurricane Elsa were dumping on the area, so we headed back to Rutland to spend another day with our daughter.
Didn’t see much wildlife on the trip, sadly. A few deer along the road in Bucksport, and one barred owl in Acadia on an easy walkway near Sieur des Monts. Some lovely views along the various drives - we deliberately took out of the way routes where we could (e.g. US 2 most of the way from Mt Washington to Bucksport, then US 1 most of the way south toward Portland).
Oh - and my car’s nav system voice detection stinks. I tried to get it to give me directions to the “Mount Washington Cog Railway” and it said “Did you say ‘National Bank of Kuwait’?”. Er, no, no we did not. Though they DO have a branch in Manhattan, so I suppose if we’d taken the shortest route back home it wouldn’t have been THAT far out of our way…
It’s a beautiful drive but there is no second ‘N’ in the name, and no ‘K’. It’s Kancamagus.