Bar Harbor is the door to Mount Desert Island, the large granite island off the coast of Maine where Acadia National Park spreads over mountains, ponds and rocky shore. The town sits on Frenchman Bay, with the humped shapes of the Porcupine Islands offshore, and it has been a summer destination since the 1800s, when wealthy families from Boston and Philadelphia built huge shingle mansions they called cottages. A great fire in 1947 burned a lot of them, but the town rebuilt, and its streets are now a mix of old inns, gift shops, and lobster restaurants.
The riding starts right away. The Park Loop Road, about twenty-seven miles of one-way and two-way roads, tours the shore at Sand Beach and Thunder Hole, climbs along Jordan Pond, and branches to the summit of Cadillac Mountain, which at 1,530 feet is the highest point on the US Atlantic coast. In autumn and winter it is among the first places in the country to see the sunrise. A park pass is required for vehicles, and the loop gets crowded in July and August, so the best hours are early morning or after supper. The road surface is generally good, the speed limits low, and wildlife crossings are possible. In foggy weather, which is common, the view vanishes but the smell of spruce and sea stays.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded the carriage roads, a network of broken-stone paths with handsome stone bridges, and they are closed to motor vehicles, so bikes belong on the park loop instead. The granite is pink and pale, scraped by glaciers, and the rock faces plunge straight into the Atlantic.
Bar Harbor has about two and a half thousand year-round residents, and it fills with visitors and cruise-ship crowds in season, so parking is tight. Fuel is available in town, though prices are higher, and Ellsworth, about twenty-four kilometres to the north, is the nearest bigger town with larger shops and services. A lobster roll at a harbourside shack is a fair prize at the end of the day, and nights are cool even in August.