3 September 2013 - Acadia National Park

Right now it is dark outside, rain is falling and lightning flashes illuminate the ocean followed by booming rumbles of thunder.  We were promised thunderstorms today, but they courteously waited until we had completed our activities before marching in to lights and drums.  We checked off another one of the items on my "bucket list" today when we visited Acadia National Park.  Once again I am so delighted to have purchased my lifetime pass to the parks. Show the pass and with a smile your are in, no hassle, no cost.  We stopped at the Park visitor center and purchased a CD auto tour of the park. We followed the instructions and had a marvelous exposure to this gift given to the USA.  It was initially protected by John D. Rockefeller who then gifted it to the country. It has since been expanded to about 47,000 acres of beauty.  It is the second most visited NP in the country, after Yellowstone.  When we started our tour, it seemed as if we might be visited by rain again, but we had none and the experience was a marvel and a wonder.  I have now seen the Maine coast as I imagined it and its awesome grandeur is indeed beyond adequate description.  The coast sweeps along with granite cliffs of gray and pink, harbors, rocks and forested shores.  This area was carved by ancient glaciers and rock moraines, scooped out valley lakes and boulder erratics (isolated large boulders deposited by the glaciers) decorate the gently rolling hills.

The coast is a wall of solid granite, with the waves painting murals of spray as they crash into the rigid barriers.  Stopping points along the road allow you to climb over the rocks and roots to get to the edges and feel the mist and hear the rushing waves beat against the stone. 

Fog in soft cottony billows floated into and out of the harbors, hiding and then revealing the coastal margins and forest ramparts marching to the edge of the sea.  We found a place to sit on the leveled pink granite and I could have spent hours feeling the soul refreshing awesome power of the sea in combat with the outcroppings barring its movement.  The fog obscured the horizon, but we could hear the spectral moan of hidden fog horns and the cathedral clang of the bells rocking on the warning buoys.  Lobster boats, with their seagull fan club swirling behind, motored about dropping lobster pots, attached to color-coded floats, each waiting for a lobster invasion and to be snatched from the sea floor when the boats return.

We visited one spot where the granite had fissured with the pounding of the ocean, creating a crevasse with a hollow cavity in the end.  When the tide is high or the ocean fierce with storm, the waves plunge into the narrow space between vertical walls and explode a boom of compressed air and water in a towering spray and vibrating thunder rumble.  When we arrived, the tide was slowly coming in, the sea soft and we called it a "gurgle hole".  But it still stirred the senses.  We enjoyed the chance to share this experience together.

Following the guided tour we drove up a snaking road to the top of Mount Cadillac, the highest point on the east coast, at about 3000 feet. Its windswept top, free of trees, with exposed and weathered smooth stone outcroppings, offers a view of all the surrounding park and ocean, except when fogged in, as it was when we arrived. The air felt good and the breeze fresh, but we started back down the road.  A short way down, we received a tender mercy when the fog lifted, the sun's brilliance shone and we were gifted with the view we sought.  We looked down on Bar Harbor, with a tall ship in full sail leaving the harbor, fog banks nestled on the islands and the vista grand.  It made the whole mountain experience a wonder.

We finished our excursion by traveling to the southern-most tip of the area, Bass Harbor.  It is here that a light house warns ships of the rocky shoals and dangerous headland.  If you travel east from this point, you do not encounter land until you reach France, 3200 miles away and to the south, Venezuela, 2500 miles distant. The lighthouse is functional and still sheds its rotating, red warning light and offshore the warning bell still clangs, rocking to and fro.  As we arrived the fog drifted in again, emphasizing the eerie majesty of the ever-reliable sentinel.

Tomorrow we will leave this magical and wondrous place to begin our return.  As a climax to the visit, I was able to sit with Mom, at the waterfront, and have a classical Maine lobster dinner, with delicious, creamy, thick clam chowder, tasty cornbread, new, young corn on the cob, roasted slices of red Maine potatoes and a pile of sweet lobster meat, dipped in melted butter.  We topped the meal with freshly made wild blueberry pie a'la mode.  It was a fitting conclusion for this leg of the adventure.