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| Lobster Pound with boiling cauldrens |
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| Bar Harbor |
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| Leaves turning on Jordan Pond |
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| Bridge over the Jordan river? |
We're just outside Bar Harbor and will be moving into Acadia Nat’l Park tomorrow. Tonight we went to a Lobster pound for dinner. A lobster pound is little more than a roadside stand that sells lobster dinners either eat in or take out. The one we went to was packed, we were lucky to find a parking space in front of the place which is along the highway. Kind of like the artichoke stands near Castroville. Outside the stand are cauldrons of boiling water with clouds of steam wafting into the air. Inside you order your lobster, small, medium or large. The guy opens up a big chest filled with live lobsters, you pick the one you want. He weighs the lobsters you choose and he puts them in a net bag and he gives you the number of the bag. He writes the number and the weight on a blackboard. The bag goes outside into the cauldron. You get in line and order, coleslaw, corn on the cob, green salad, and a drink and tell them the number that the lobster guy gave us. You pay for the meal and wait for the lobster to come out of the boiler. It all comes to you on a rubber platter, or in our case, as take out, in a plastic bag. We even ordered lobster picks and a shell cracker. We took it all home and had a feast.
Acadia Island has been a haven for people for thousands of years. For the most part it was where the local Indians spent their summers until the Europeans showed up some 400 years ago. The French and the English fought over the place for a 150 years, and then the rich Americans claimed the place beginning in the 1830s or so. Around the 1900s the rich felt guilty about having such a beautiful place all to themselves and started a movement to donate land to create a national park. George Dorr and John D. Rockefeller worked together to have land donated or bought to be gifted to the government to become a national park. The island is still a patchwork of private land and park land, but it seems to work as the island is mostly pristine with pockets of private land and industry.
Bar Harbor is the quintessential Maine seaside tourist village. It is a tourist attraction today with thousands of visitors each year. It has the charm of 150 year old village storefronts, an arts community, a fishing village, and national park all combined. Great bars, restaurants, galleries, t-shirt shops, museums and sports activities are all here.
We went on a sailing excursion on a 150 foot four masted schooner out into Frenchmen’s Bay. With a brisk wind that parted one of the as sails we sailed out amongst the whitecaps and looked for wild life. There was a forest service ranger aboard and he did his best to make a big deal of sighting sea gulls and a harbor seal. We did see a loon or two, which I guess is a big deal, but the Canadians have the loon on their $1 coins so I think they are probably rather common. It was a good sail, and I was fascinated by the rigging of the gaff rigged sails and watching the crew handle the rig. What a great summer job for a young person to have!
We have travelled around Acadia now, went to the top of Cadillac mountain, visited some real island villages that make their way either fishing or boat building, driven by some of the estate “cottages” left over from the 1920s or so, and drove the Loop Road which is in the National Park. I guess because this is a three day weekend, this place is packed. The Queen Elizabeth II was in port so that added another 2000 guests on the island. We hiked around Jordan Pond a lovely 3 mile walk amongst the yellow and crimson turning trees. One is supposed to take tea and popovers at the Jordan House at the end of the walk, but there were so many damned tourists that we couldn’t get a table. We opted for Bloody Mary’s and Lobster rolls at a tavern in Bar Harbor.
It is getting cold here. We’ve donned our winter cloths; coats, hats, and gloves and thinking it is time to head south.
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