Not much to report today. We’re so glad we went back
up on Cadillac Mountain yesterday afternoon because the clouds settled back
down to the ground again today. We wouldn’t have had a hope of any view
if we’d waited.
We went back into the park to see some of the things we’d
missed earlier…….the Nature Center, the Wild Gardens of Acadia and the Abbe
Museum. The Nature Center is small but good. The Wild Gardens are
managed by volunteers who do a wonderful job with of maintaining it with native
species. Much of it looked like what we find in our home mountains.
I was amazed to find a bed of hay-scented ferns which spread like wildfire at
home. They either don’t spread that way up here or the gardeners manage
to keep them corralled.
Acadia’s Nature Center.
The icy cold pond which flows out of the Sieur de Monts
spring at the Nature Center. It doesn’t have ice floating in it but it
sure looks like it.
The Sieur de Monts spring house, built for George Dorr’s
estate in the early 1900’s. Water is piped from the spring down to the
pond.
The effort to create a protected preserve on Mount Desert
Island, beginning in 1909, was started and maintained by George Dorr, a wealthy
Bostonian conservationist. He spent his life and his personal wealth in
this effort. Sieur de Monts was one of his properties, part of what he
donated to the federal government for the establishment of the park. It
was originally Sieur de Monts National Monument, then Lafayette National Park,
then finally renamed Acadia National Park. It was the first national park
in the east and is now over 47,000 acres. It is sad that Dorr died almost
blind and in poverty, living in the caretaker’s cottage of the property that
had been his family’s in Bar Harbor. Dorr and his conservation-minded
colleagues were responsible for the preservation of the land which makes up
this beautiful park. Without their efforts it would be covered up by
homes and businesses, just like the Bar Harbor area, with no access for those
who don’t own land here.
We lucked into a parking spot at Sand Beach so we were able
to get a look at the beach area. It’s what’s known as a pocket beach
which is very rare. The sand covers a layer of granite cobbles and it can
all be washed out to sea in a hurricane or nor’wester. The clouds were on
the ground and misting heavily so we decided not to hang around. It seems
as if our rain jackets are always where we’re not…..in the truck if we’re in
the RV, in the RV if we’re in the truck. We aren’t big on walking in sand
under the best of conditions and wet sand is definitely not our thing.
On the way back to the campground we missed a turn and ended
up having to go through Bar Harbor again. It wasn’t much better than the
last time……packed with cars, some of which were parked half way across the
lane. Bet the locals hate the traffic. Tourists are necessary for
the economy but they sure are a nuisance.
Tomorrow we’re heading up to St Agatha at the northernmost
tip of Maine. From there we’re going to explore the northern end of
Aroostook County (Maine), the Edmundston, NB, area and a little bit of
Quebec. The reason for going so far north is that my Acadian grandmother
was born in 1873 in St-Basile which has since been absorbed by Edmundston. She was born before the US/Canada border was confirmed so things were
rather mixed up, but St-Basile was definitely in New Brunswick rather than
Maine because it was on the Canadian side of the St. John River. Acadia
covers Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The French there speak a different
dialect from the one spoken in Quebec, a dialect more similar to where they came
from in France in the 1600’s.
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