My wife, Jane, and I drove from our home in Mississauga to Bar Harbor, Maine earlier this month, using my 2018 Mazda 3 and the route to and from gave me a glimpse of America I hadn’t seen before. I’ve been in the U.S. many times for work and vacation, and many ways I now have a better understanding of the rural fabric of the U.S. and the country in general.
We went to Bar Harbor because Jane had seen it featured in a TV show. Bar Harbor also appealed to her as a tourist town because it overlooked the Atlantic Ocean.
Maine is the headquarters of L.L. Bean, the clothing store that is famous for its outdoor gear and camping equipment. We’ve shopped from the catalogue and bought clothes at a store near us.
Jane chose the route to get to Maine, specifically going east to Quebec and then veering into Vermont. Though we had navigation issues once we crossed over to Quebec – mostly my fault because I am terrible with directions and lousy reading maps – we made it to Vermont and stayed overnight in Burlington after driving eight or so hours.
The next day we began a linear route using a country highway and went through small towns, each of which had Dunkin’ Donuts stores seemingly everywhere. They are the equivalent to Tim Hortons but have all but ceased operations in Canada.
We also saw numerous Irving/Circle K gas stations. The Irving family is famous in New Brunswick for its oil business.
From Vermont we continued into New Hampshire, which had a Santa’s Village, which reminded me so much of a similar theme park in Bracebridge that became a regular stop for me spending summers nearby at the family cottage in Baysville. Jane and I often took our kids, Ben and Shayna, to Santa’s Village when they were younger.
Our route through New Hampshire seemed to take forever because of ongoing road work. Throughout the drive, we kept looking for signs indicating how far or close we were to Maine.
They were nowhere to be seen and I kept saying to myself what it must be like to travel with kids saying, “How much further?” In rural roads in Ontario, there are signs everywhere giving you distances to the nearest towns.
We continued into Maine and headed towards Bangor, which is the major city nearest to Bar Harbor. It just so happened the small town of Ellsworth on route to Bangor had an L.L. Bean outlet, which was lucky for us because we could visit it on the way back instead of going into a store in a more prominent part of the state.
I had already booked reservations in Bar Harbor at The Bluenose Inn. It sits high atop a hill and provides an excellent view of the harbor. Jane said she wanted an oceanfront view. The inn is named after the famous Nova Scotian fishing vessel, Bluenose, which has been memorialized on three Canadian stamps and is featured on the Nova Scotia license plate and the Canadian dime. Exactly why the hotel is specifically named The Bluenose, I’m not sure.
The Bluenose Inn is pure Americana because of American flags draping various areas of the property. There’s even enlarged 15-foot high Muskoka chairs with the hotel logo and painted in red, white and blue. I snapped a shot of Jane sitting in one.
Now I’ll be honest, it isn’t cheap to stay at the hotel. In Canadian currency, it is north of $600 a night. It has amenities such as an outdoor pool and indoor pool with a sauna, whirlpool and exercise facility but does not provide complimentary breakfast that many cheaper hotels do. . I emphasize cheaper. It has a restaurant with a great view and a relatively inexpensive menu. I recommend eating in town anyway because of the many restaurants with so many different menus, not all lobster and seafood by the way. The pizza places are really good.
Each day we trekked down the hill into town, which took about 20 minutes. We quickly developed pain in our calves from the walks, which we opted to do rather than drive into town. We found it a great way to get into shape and burn off calories. Parking is also an issue in town.
There are also shops for clothing featuring Bar Harbor and Maine logos. One of the more interesting restaurants is called Geddy’s, which has a cartoon on the storefront window of Rush bassist Geddy Lee. He has no stake in it and I’m not sure if he knows about Geddy’s. As an aside, his autobiography, My Effin’ Life, was on sale at a bookstore across the road.
There’d also a few craft breweries in town, including one with the slogan “Save The Ales.”
Bar Harbor has estates that are remnants of places built more than a century ago. Bar Harbor had high-society events reported in the New York Times and other prominent newspapers in cities on the East Coast. Smack dab in town is La Rochelle, a 41-room, 13,000 square foot mansion purchased by the Historical Society in 2019 because it wanted a new location for its museum. The mansion was originally the summer home of the Bowdoin family, who lived on Park Avenue and brought their servants with them for the summer.
Some of the estates have been converted into bed and breakfasts inns. A fire in 1947 in the business district burned 170 permanent homes and five large historic hotels. While there is a monument heading into town of the great fire, you would not even know there had been any damage in the area.
Bar Harbor has daily boat tours to see wildlife and marine life. For $5 you can rent binoculars, which we didn’t do, which was a mistake. It would have been useful to see the bald eagles, which seemed perched invisibly in the dense trees far off in the distance. The tour guide kept insisting they were there, and I was waiting for one to dart into the water, pick up a fish and fly away. It was far easier to see the whales, seals and dolphins. I snapped some photos, but didn’t see any whales breaching, which Jane and I saw during our trip several years ago to Gloucester, Massachusetts. Parts of the movie The Perfect Storm were shot there, by the way.
I took a pill to avoid sea sickness. We were told by the tour guide the undulation of the ocean could cause the boat to go rock. She strongly recommended holding on to the rails and look at the horizon if you felt sick. I saw numerous people with their heads in the “motion sickness bag” – that’s not as harsh as barf bags. The marine life cruise took four hours because we had to go far to track the whales, so I felt sorry for the people who spent all that time feeling sick and not getting to experience the wonders of these mammals.
Near the hotel is Acadia National Park. It is famous for its cliffs and trails, but it’s almost impossible to park near the main center unless you get there really early in the morning. Parking your car on the curving roads near the trails is not easy. We were hoping to find Sand Beach and Echo Beach, which apparently are popular for swimming, but we couldn’t find parking for either, and ended up frustrated and just wanted to get back to the hotel. There are shuttles available around town if you want to tour the park.
If you want to go swimming, Bar Harbor is not the place to do it. Gloucester has places to swim with pristine white beaches, either for the ocean or lakes. Bar Harbor has a sand bar crossing over to an island, but you have to hit it during high tide, and once you get to the island there is nothing to see. The ocean water in Bar Harbor is cold, far more than in Gloucester. If you want to swim in Bar Harbor, a hotel is your best bet. The Bluewater Inn has a great outdoor pool.
After five nights we checked out and began the drive back home, this time with Jane choosing a more mainstream highway route. We stopped off at the L.L. Bean outlet and picked up some clothes and then proceeded to the nearest main thoroughfare into New Hampshire, then Massachusetts and New York. We stopped off in Springfield, but much to our surprise and chagrin the hotels were all booked. The first one was reserved by the U.S. Government for immigrants. When it became apparent we were out of luck, we drove an hour to Albany, only to find out vacancy was also an issue. We finally found a hotel that had one room available. Having driven eight hours, we just wanted a place to settle for the night. We considered ourselves lucky because we had thoughts of sleeping in the car. The room had a dank smell and broken air conditioning and couldn’t be fixed at that hour. We opened a window and were told we’d be given a break in the rate.
The next day we had breakfast, which was included in the room rate, and drove four hours to Buffalo. I was stunned by a sign that said Welcome To Buffalo, An All America City. I didn’t see any town signs throughout our trip that purposely had America written on it.
We arrived home two hours later. It took basically the same time overall for the drives to and from Bar Harbor, but less stressful on the way back, notwithstanding the issue with the hotels.
If you want to visit Bar Harbor, I recommend driving there rather than flying and renting a car if you want a true glimpse of America. If you want to spend less money staying in a bed-and-breakfast inn rather than something fancier, it’s an option depending on your budget. If you want to go somewhere to swim in the ocean or a lake, this is not the vacation spot to do it.
But if you want seafood with a view of the ocean and a great vibe, it’s worth the trip.
By the way, I saw t-shirts with the words BAA HAA BAA. I had to laugh at that. I didn’t detect any strong Massachusetts accents around town, but it was funny, nonetheless.
Bahaha.
Perry Lefko is the Content Manager of The Car Magazine. He can be reached at [email protected]. Feel free to forward any story suggestions or comments.