Hiking the trails

As we know from elsewhere, one of the things the USA does really well is National Parks. Here on Mount Desert Island (or MDI as it's known), a large part of the island is the Acadia national park. With a huge network of well marked and maintained trails, frequent free buses, low entry fees (fairly high if you are in your car, but only $10 for us all for a week), this place is a nature lovers paradise.

We left the boat anchored in Somes Sound, a beautiful fjord in the middle of the island, and caught the bus into Bar Harbor, the main town on the island. It's very full, touristy and somewhat kitsch (having become a destination for cruise ships - thought we'd got away from them) but is still a nice place to stop and grab lunch before heading off to the hills.

Out again in the park, we chose a short but steep little trail from a lake up about five hundred feet and above the treeline, and it was marvellous. The kids love hiking when it's not flat, there's scrambling and exploring to be done and they compete to find the next blue blaze of paint that marks the trail. Higher us there are cairns too, including special ones that you only get here in Acadia, but more on that in another post...

The way down is even more steep, including a great little ravine about three feet wide and twenty deep, with ladders in places to help us descend the trail. At the bottom, the trail breaks out onto the park loop road and within ten minutes, there's the bus back to Bar Harbor, civilisation and a cup of coffee. Despite this being the second most visited park in the USA (after Yellowstone), on our three hour hike we saw about ten other people.

Since the water temperature is somewhere between freezing and bloody cold, we are never in the water, unlike the Caribbean where we were rarely out of it. Instead, this part of the adventure is all about land and there is plenty to explore and discover ashore.