Road trip round New England – Part 3 – the East Coast bit

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• Location: USA
• Holiday Types: City break, Family holidays

• by: JosieDriver
• on: Wed 23 May 2012

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Leaving Franconia in New Hampshire we travelled to Bar Harbor in Maine, quite a trip as it took us seven hours.  The leaf colours were still fantastic but it did get greener as we approached the coast. I guess the colours are about a week to ten days behind here.

We stayed at the Holland Inn in Bar Harbor itself.  I recommend this one as the rooms were well furnished and cosy but its real selling point is the breakfasts that Evin cooks. Breakfast is served at 7:30, 8:30 or 9:30am and it was a different one on each of the three mornings we were there. You are presented with a plated cooked breakfast with three different dishes, for example, it could be a warm fruit salad with a vanilla dressing, plus a tartlet of ham, cheese, eggs and herbs, plus French toast with blueberries - all freshly prepared.  Evin is also a mine of information on things to do and places to go on the island.

A must-do is to taking the bus into the national park.  You can pay to have just bus tickets or combined bus and car.  We chose the latter so that we could drive up to the top of Cadillac Mountain for magnificent views over the islands and forest, the buses do not go up here.  
The town of Bar Harbor itself is not so interesting. There are cruise ships in the harbour each day and that means crowds around the shops in the small town. It also means the shops are stocked with the tourist t-shirts and stuffed toys. Drive to one of the other villages on the island to get a better view of local life.  There was a dramatic forest fire in 1947 which destroyed probably half the forest and many large holiday mansions.  Many of these were never rebuilt. The forest has slowly regenerated but with a much restricted set of species and it does not get the fall colours so much as there are a lot of conifers.

After three days here we drove down to Kennebunkport, but w e were quite disappointed with the town. It is very picturesque with lots of shops and a few restaurants, but out of season the beach was not an option and there seems to be little else to do in the area. We drove around a bit but all we could find were holiday homes along the shoreline and typical holiday retail in malls further inland. Not a place I would go back to.

We stayed at the Kennebunkport Inn in the centre of town but w e were placed in the annex across the road - it was quite pleasant though, even if breakfast was disappointing and the restaurant when we tried one evening was mediocre.
After this we took the car back to Boston and the train to New York.  Guess what, the train we were supposed to get was cancelled and the one an hour later was delayed en route for a further hour.  Like being back in England!

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