Acadia National Park - The Adventure Continues

In the summer of 2011, our family of four enjoyed our first ever visit to Acadia National Park in Maine.  At the time, our son, Ryan, was 17 and our daughter, Kyra, was 12.  (That awkward “tween” age would explain the response I received from Kyra when I asked the kids if I could post a particular photo of them in Bar Harbor – “Oh my God please no!”  That, my friends, is the reason I always ask first.)  My previous blog post covered some of Acadia’s history, the hiking trails we tackled and a bit about the carriage roads that we enjoyed biking.  This post details our experiences with water sports in the Park, our pilgrimage to the summit of Cadillac Mountain, some touristy fun around the town of Bar Harbor and a favorite tradition at The Jordan Pond House.

Acadia National Park - The Lure of the Land, the Call of the Sea

I nearly choked on my morning coffee when I realized that it has been four weeks since my last blog post.  Alan and I spent most of the past month getting our ducks in a row for a couple of not-so-easy real estate transactions.  But I’m also happy to report that we managed to sneak in a short trip to Seven Points Campground, an Army Corps of Engineers facility on Raystown Lake in Pennsylvania.  (Watch for a future post on that long-awaited excursion.)  Since life finally seems to be quieting down a bit, I’m really happy to settle in at the keyboard again and share our Acadia adventures with you.  Our first visit was so full of exceptional and delightful experiences that it might take more than one post to deliver all the details. We’ll see how it goes. 

This post is dedicated to my cousin Anna who, I’m pretty sure, really, really wants to visit Maine, and to my cousins John and Janine who go there often.

Acadia National Park had been on my bucket list for years.  In actuality, it’s one of the National Parks closest to our home in the northeast United States.  Therein lies the problem.  Because Acadia is more accessible to us than the numerous Parks out west, it made sense to Alan and me to travel further when the kids were young and he could pull four weeks of vacation at a clip.  After all, it takes us at least five solid days of driving to make it from one end of the country to another.  So travel time alone often knocks off a week and a half of scheduled vacation time on our National Parks trips.  For a variety of reasons (none of which matter a bit here), we finally decided to visit Acadia National Park in the summer of 2011 when Ryan was 17 and Kyra was 12.  This exquisite Park immediately shot to the top of my favorites list.