June 12, 2023
Active Rest Day on Mount Desert Island
My motel is on a bluff five miles north of Bar Harbor. No crowds of tourists just peace and quiet.
When I checked in last night the desk clerk gave me a business card for a new shuttle service that could take me and The Mule to the summit of Cadillac Mountain, the highest peak on the eastern seaboard. I didn’t much feel like waiting in line to do anything so I set it aside.
This morning I rearranged my bags so that I’d have only the essentials for tooling around Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park.
I rode to Bar Harbor and had a massive breakfast. Pancakes, eggs, bacon, hash browns, a blueberry muffin, and coffee. It was 9:50 and as luck would have it the shuttle was going to leave town in ten minutes. I rode to the shuttle stop and found Ellen Finn, owner and driver, of the brand new, big green Mercedes van that constitutes her new business, the Cadillac Mountain Summit Shuttle. For $10 (plus tip) she drives people up to the summit. (You can go one way, up or down, or round trip.)
It’s a brand new business so The Mule was her very first bike passenger. (She can accommodate two bikes on a rack on the back of the van.)
On this particular run I was her only customer so we had a continuous chat all the way up.
It turns out, like my wife, Ellen is a Deadhead. Ellen first saw the Dead when she was 14. Her brother was an usher at the Palace Theater in her hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut. He let her in a back door. Fifty years later almost to the day she saw Bob Weir at the same venue.
Check out her business at Cadillacmtnshuttle.com.
After saying goodbye I wandered around at the summit for a while. Haze from Canadian fires put a damper on the views but on a clear day I’ll bet it’s pretty spectacular up there. You could easily spend a day just roaming around the trails and gawking at the views.
I rode down the mountain, feathering my brakes so as to enjoy the view and not go flying off to my certain doom. It’s actually much less scary than most of the descents I did last summer out west.
Near the bottom I ran into a mountain biker with whom I briefly talked in the summit parking lot. He told me of a way to access the carriage trails in the park.
There was a long and a short route to the trails. He went long and I went short. I had forgotten to pack tire repair gear so I didn’t want to stray too far from my hotel. In any case, by luck, I managed to do both the summit and the carriage trails.
(For those of you wondering, the carriage trails resemble the GAP Trail in Pennsylvania. They are a great place for a quiet, car-free ride in the woods. You do not need a mountain bike.)
The trail that I rode was gently rolling. Near the end it had one ominous sign. The hill is not all that steep but if you don’t ride bikes often you’d probably want to slow your roll.
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After exiting the park I stopped at a gas-station country store straight out of Mayberry. I bought lunch: a chicken salad sandwich, “local” (actually from Alberta) potato chips, a huge brownie, and an iced tea.
I ate some of my grub on the porch of the store half expecting Howard Sprague or Floyd the Barber to come wandering by for a sit.
Back at the motel I took a hot shower then went out to the deck which faces more trees than ocean and finished my lunch. I also drank the beer I bought yesterday and ate an old Elvis Presley It’s-Now-or-Never banana that I’d been transporting for a couple of days.
Tonight if I’m at all hungry I’ll walk to a barbecue place up the road for dinner. Tomorrow promises to be a wet one; a reminder that you don’t get all this lovely greenery without a shit ton of rain.
Today I rode past the 5,000-mile mark for 2023. Yikes.
There are more pix on my Instagram and Flickr pages. Just search for Rootchopper.
Today's ride: 19 miles (31 km)
Total: 1,142 miles (1,838 km)
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