Together is the Best Place to Be, Day 5: Acadia National Park

Nova Scotia 2007
Day 5: Wednesday June 20
Copyright(c) 2007, Jim Beachy

It’s scheduled to be a lazy day to Bar Harbor, Maine, only 132 miles plus whatever riding we might do around Acadia National Park. So we decide to sleep in but somehow we are on the road before 9:00 AM even after a walking trip to Wal-Mart across the parking lot to pick up some ponchos and some lunch food. Typically we’ve been carrying along a bit of lunch, usually packed in ice in the trailer’s cooler, and we eat it at a rest stop or picnic area. Some years ago Kitty came up with the ingenious technique of packing stuff in ice overnight at the motel; by morning, the ice is melted but the food or water is ice-cold. She then repacks it in ice, puts it in the trailer’s cooler, and we have cold food and ice-cold water all day, even in extreme heat.


My plan today is simple and entirely consistent with the T-shirt I’m wearing: “I live in my own little world but it’s Ok — they know me here.” It’s a shirt Kitty found in the Whitehorse Press catalog and is one of my favorites. Funny, isn’t it, how a little thing like the choice of T-shirt or your favorite jeans can make your day a little brighter?


So in keeping with my simple plan, we simply follow US Rt. 1 from Brunswick to Bar Harbor. On prior rides, we’ve spent some time in the Bath shipyards where they build US Navy destroyers, and we’ve prowled around the little harbors of Wiscasset and Rockland and Bucksport, so we opt to just ride to Bar Harbor, get there early, ride around a bit, and check in to our motel. It’s laundry night.

The morning starts out with light cloud cover and the threat of rain, pregnant with a heavy feeling of moisture. Our magical umbrella of clear blue sky has disappeared, but we opt to start out without rain gear in 65-degree temperatures.

US Rt. 1 in this corridor is almost entirely built up and there is scarcely a mile that doesn’t contain a house, a building, or a New England inn. It takes a special frame of mind to actually enjoy this road that’s so different from Route 100 or the Kancamagus Highway. But because I live in my own little world, I’m able to adjust, and Kitty and I have an enjoyable slow-down ride to Bar Harbor, where we arrive shortly before 1:00 PM after checking in at the visitor center. The temperature near the ocean has dropped 10 degrees and it’s about 55 F. Kitty has put on her balaclava, which is a silk hooded thing that covers her head and back of the neck to help keep wind out off the neck and out of the back of the jacket. The passenger always gets more wind than the rider. It makes her look like a monk until she puts on her helmet. Then she looks normal.

Cadillac Mountain is socked in with fog, we learn at the visitor center, so there’s no point in riding up there. We do ride the 35-mph Park Loop Road, all of which is enjoyable but is most scenic on the one-way route on the northwest side of the Mount Desert Island, where surf crashes into the formidable granite rocks that form the seacoast here. All the while the sky threatens and rain occasionally spits on our Tulsa windshield. We check out Thunder Hole where the incoming tide often creates spectacular thundering sprays of foam, but today it is just Gurgle Hole.


We get back to the hotel early, before 4:00 PM and before the rain starts in earnest. The rain never materializes except for a few drops on the windshield. The Dance of the Rainsuit will not be needed this day. But later, when we walk to Jack Russell’s Steakhouse near the hotel for a fantastic steak dinner, the rain is coming down in slanting sheets. By this time my Wing is under the portico of the hotel where the desk clerk suggested I park (I didn’t even ask to park it there), safely cleaned and covered as it is every night. We’ve ridden only 166 miles today. Getting to this spot could have been scripted in 735 miles. Instead, we’ve ridden just under 1,400 miles. And we are the richer for it!

Here we sit waiting for the laundry to be finished. Kitty is reading and I’m writing. Seems rather normal, now that I think about it.

Tomorrow is a “hard point” to the trip. It’s the day we take The CAT ferry from Bar Harbor to Nova Scotia. It leaves at 8:00 AM. We need to be at the terminal at 7:00 AM. I’m terrified we’ll oversleep. If we do, that’s a trip breaker, as it’s the last ferry of the week from Bar Harbor. We would probably need to reverse our trip through Nova Scotia, riding through Maine and New Brunswick into Nova Scotia, and then take The CAT back into the USA from Yarmouth, NS. It would mess up all my reservations and all the trip-sketching I’ve done. My friend and colleague Nichole, a former Navy helicopter pilot, might say at this point, “The helicopter didn’t crash and nobody died. It’s been a good day.” Still, it would mess things up quite a bit. I do not want to miss that ferry, so we set two alarms and ask for a last-ditch wake-up call at 5:30 AM.

I’ll feel better when I’m on that ship with the bike securely tied down in the motorcycle area. Tomorrow, Lord willing, we’ll be in Nova Scotia.