Carriage Roads in Acadia National Park

There are certain things every tourist needs to do when visiting Acadia National Park. On Monday, we accomplished two of them - bicycle the carriage roads and have popovers at Jordan Pond House. 

Before becoming a National Park, a good part of Mount Desert Island was owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. From 1913 to 1940, John Jr. oversaw the construction of 45 miles of rustic carriage roads, where he and his rich friends would travel all over the island by horse and buggy - no autos allowed. The roads travel up and down mountains, along several ponds and out by the ocean. Centrally located along the trail system is the Jordan Pond House, which serves lunch, dinner and high tea. Their specialty is the "popover," which is a light hollow roll made from an egg batter baked in muffin tins. As the batter rises, it pops over the rim.

We started our bicycle adventure by taking the bus to Eagle Lake.

We then biked over to Bubble Pond. We then climbed high up the mountain overlooking Jordan Pond.

We learned the hard way that not all the carriage roads are open to bikes; those on private property are not. We ended up going downhill for about a mile before we learned we could not continue on the route we planned and had to bike back up the mountain. We cycled 10 miles before stopping for lunch at the Jordan Pond House.

We were a little nervous when we saw the line of cars trying to find a place to park and the hundreds of bikes chained up in the front yard. However, the place is really large and run very efficiently. They seated us right away.  Since we still had more biking ahead of us, we both opted for salads. Kathy had a small crab cake added to her salad, but Dave wanted a second popover. After lunch, we decided to walk around Jordan Pond to let lunch digest. Here is Kathy picking some blueberries for dessert.

The two mountains at the far end of Jordan Pond are the Bubble Mountains - North Bubble and South Bubble.  A combined name for them of "Boob Mountain" just didn't make the cut.

After lunch, we set out to complete the second half of our loop.  On the way back to Bubble Pond, we passed the entrance road to Day Mountain. We checked our map. It was only 1.5 miles to the summit. Come on - how bad could it be? Well, it wasn't easy, but we didn't walk our bikes like some of the other tourists did. We made it up with plenty of energy and leg strength to spare, although we appreciated the rest at the top.  Here Kathy places a stone by the summit marker to celebrate our victory over the mountain.

As you can see, the views were amazing.  We could see for miles out into the ocean.

I wish I could say it was all downhill from there, but that is not the case with these carriage roads. Rockefeller loved to have the roads go up and down, up and down, sort of like a roller coaster. Before we knew it, we were back at Eagle Lake.

The biker shuttle van picked us up and took us to Bar Harbor to catch the bus for Bass Harbor. There was a 20 minute layover in downtown Bar Harbor. Can you say "ice cream"? Today's flavor was peanut butter!