No matter how much you love your life, there are times when you long for escape. One minute you're staring at the papers on your desk, and suddenly you're imagining crystalline waves crashing onto a jagged shoreline with thrilling explosions of foaming white spray. You're basking on a sun-warmed rock with your beloved.
How many hours do otherwise productive citizens spend annually wishing they were in Maine? Far too many, judging by the throngs that come to enjoy its magnificent natural beauty every year. Among the biggest draws is Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, whose largest settlement was once named Eden -- an apt description for its awe-inspiring scenery.
In the mid-19th century, the region was discovered by landscape painters, Frederic Church and Thomas Cole among them, whose dramatic seascapes helped create a vogue for Maine's pink-granite shores. Sportsmen and journalists spread the word, urban tourists flocked northward to "rusticate," and soon Eden became a popular resort where wealthy industrialists built palatial "cottages"; summer residents of the area included the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Pulitzers and the Morgans.
By 1918, when Eden was renamed Bar Harbor, its most influential families had grown concerned about development. So John D. Rockefeller Jr. joined forces with Harvard president Charles Eliot and Boston textile heir and conservationist George Dorr to lobby for the creation of the first national park east of the Mississippi. Rockefeller donated more than 11,000 acres and also sponsored the forty-five-mile network of car-free carriage roads that wind through the park, punctuated by seventeen stone-faced bridges. Additional bequests expanded Acadia's acreage to include a parcel of land at the southern tip of the Schoodic Peninsula, which juts into the Atlantic east of Mount Desert Island.
My own escape to Eden was part of a longer journey that began more than twenty years ago. Several generations of my family had spent summers on Cape Cod, which is as familiar to me as the back of my hand, but after my husband, Jeremy, and I got married, we yearned for fresh territory we could discover together. We rented a house, sight unseen, for a blissful vacation on tiny Long Island, near Portland, where we took our sixteen-month-old daughter to the same pebbled beach every day. One morning Emily decided to venture farther afield, and she meandered northward along the shoreline, stopping to scrutinize interesting shells and rocks. I kept waiting for her to turn around, but she didn't. "Let her explore," Jeremy said.
Emily trudged to the top of a little hill, and then -- without so much as a backward glance -- disappeared from view. I have never seen my husband run as fast as he did to retrieve her that day.
But I understood perfectly how she felt. In Maine there is always a breathtaking new vista over the hill or around the next corner. Who can resist going a little farther? In the years since then, our family has also moved steadily up the coast, enjoying Portland's restaurant renaissance, taking seal-watching trips off Boothbay Harbor, hiking on Monhegan Island and renting a house in Christmas Cove. We cruised with friends along the Damariscotta peninsula's corrugated coastline, visited former colleagues who'd left New York City to homestead on an inland farm where they grow their own food and raise their own livestock, shopped in Camden, checked out the latest art exhibitions at Rockland's Farnsworth Museum and sampled venerable inns and quaint B&Bs in one picture-postcard town after another. We've built our own history of treasured destinations (dinner at Primo restaurant in Rockland) and vivid memories (the time Emily and her best friend sailed into a squall and were almost swept out to sea!).
But as our twentieth wedding anniversary approached last summer, my husband and I were once again yearning for new experiences. Acadia National Park had always beckoned like a Siren's song, and so we decided to explore Mount Desert Island and the surrounding area.
Thanks to the prescience of its founders, Acadia remains remarkably unspoiled, but uncrowded it is not. On a bright summer morning, the parking lot at the top of Cadillac Mountain is full, and visitors cluster in noisy groups along the path that rings the summit. So many cars jam the twenty-seven-mile Park Loop Road circling Acadia that an entire lane is bumper-to-bumper with parked vehicles at famous scenic stops like Thunder Hole.
One way to avoid such congestion is to visit when crowds are thinner, in late spring, during September's idyllic Indian summer or in October's peak foliage season. But even in midsummer, another solution is literally within sight. Most of Acadia's visitors confine their explorations to Mount Desert Island; only a small percentage drive onward to the Schoodic Peninsula, and yet those who do find equally gorgeous scenery along with blessedly empty roads. Just four miles from Bar Harbor across Frenchman Bay, the densely forested Schoodic coastline remains a haven for wildlife that ranges from bald eagles and ospreys to deer and moose.
The same strategy proves equally successful in choosing restaurants and accommodations. Discerning travelers are often disappointed by the T-shirt emporiums and tacky souvenir shops of Bar Harbor, whose residents scoff that the Bar Harbor Inn is overrated and the chowder is better at nearby Testa's. Less packed places to stay and dine can be found thirty minutes west of Bar Harbor on the lovely Blue Hill Peninsula, which one guidebook describes as "a back-roads paradise" whose options range from Castine -- acclaimed by some as Maine's most gracious village -- to Blue Hill itself. At night Blue Hill's main thoroughfare is usually deserted, but Arborvine (33 Main Street; 207-374-2119; arborvine.com) is an excellent restaurant whose upscale clientele enjoys perfectly prepared meals that meet big-city standards. Nearby is the historic Blue Hill Inn (doubles from $155; 40 Union Street; 800-826-7415; bluehillinn.com), a Federal mansion that has welcomed travelers since 1840 and continues to offer four-poster beds, hearty breakfasts and helpful staffers who are eager to provide maps and suggestions for what to see in the area.
Although there's not much to do in Brooklin but buy a postcard at the sleepy little general store, literary pilgrims often make their way to the quiet village in homage to E.B. White, the much-loved author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, who lived there for more than forty years with his wife, New Yorker fiction editor Katharine S. White. But you can easily while away a day in Stonington, a picturesque fishing village on scenic Deer Isle that is dotted with restaurants and art galleries and has live professional theater, independent cinema and a community play-reading series at the Stonington Opera House (1 School Street; 207-367-2788; operahousearts.org).
Back on the mainland, those bound for the Schoodic Peninsula should pause in Ellsworth, where the restaurant Cleonice (112 Main Street; 207-664-7554; cleonice.com), a former soda fountain that retains its battered wood paneling, booths and classic swivel stools at the counter, is known for its cuisine. The first time my husband and I stopped in for lunch, he bit into his BLT and told the waitress, "This is the best bacon I've ever had in my life."
The waitress smiled. "We raise our own pigs," she said.
Cleonice's unusual menu features a canny mix of scrupulously well-executed American comfort food, from club sandwiches to fresh-from-the-ocean fish, and Mediterranean twists, like an extensive selection of first-rate tapas and mezes, including homemade hummus with freshly baked pita. The larger world has taken note; Cleonice chef and co-owner Rich Hanson was nominated for the James Beard Foundation's 2008 Best Chef Northeast award.
A few miles "down east" (northward along the coast) from Ellsworth is Hancock, where the inn Le Domaine (open June 5 through November 1; doubles from $150; 1513 U.S. Highway 1; 800-554-8498; ledomaine.com) cheers visitors with bright Provençal decor and a restaurant with authentic French cuisine, from the award-winning wine list to an impeccable chocolate soufflé (call ahead to order it).
The housing options on the Schoodic Peninsula are more limited than those in the Blue Hill region, but Prospect Harbor's Oceanside Meadows Inn (open May 22 through October 12; doubles from $139; 202 Corea Road; 207-963-5557; oceaninn.com) offers a 200-acre nature preserve and a secluded sandy beach -- the holy grail of Maine's rocky shores.
And yet, even when it comes to beaches, most visitors settle for the overcrowded tourist Mecca. On a sunny summer day, Acadia's Sand Beach is mobbed, but less than a mile across Eastern Bay is Lamoine Beach, which offers jaw-dropping views of Acadia's mountains and more than a mile of sand that Down East magazine recently extolled as one of Maine's best beaches.
Pack a picnic, spread out your blanket, and pity the long-suffering folks who are sweltering in the city.
Rusticating in Eden has never seemed like a better idea.
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