I am currently on a delayed flight from Bangor, Maine to Chicago. Manyu and I will miss our connecting flight to La Crosse, so I don’t know when we’ll get home. All that I can do is make the best of it and rough out this week’s blog.
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I am trying to remember back, but I may have just taken only the second touristy National Park vacation in my life.* In years past when I visited places like Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, even Death Valley, I went backpacking. I may be wrong in my definition of a tourist but, in my opinion, I stop being one once I spend my first night in the backcountry. Last week, however, my extended family (my mom, Manyu, my two sisters, my brother, my brother’s wife, and I) rented an airbnb in Bar Harbor, Maine, and we were definitely tourists. Together we visited the main attractions of Acadia National Park. This included a ride along the Park Loop Road, seafood dinners at various lobster shacks, a drive up Cadillac Mountain, a boat ride to see puffins, and a carriage ride along the Rockefeller family’s original carriage roads.
None of these activities are how I normally experience a natural area, but this vacation was for my ninety-year mom, and I was happy to do it. Now that the trip is over (or will be over whenever Manyu and I get home), I think of it more as an education than a holiday. Here are a few of the lessons that I learned:
1. Tourists are friendly. My only past experience with large crowds of tourists has been Disneyworld, and there I’ve always encountered people at the ends of their ropes. At Acadia, every person I encountered was relaxed and glad to be there. My opinion of humankind actually went up while I was on the trip.
2. Tourism and spontaneity are not compatible. Several members of my family would not relax until I’d put together a complete five-day itinerary. I didn’t want to do it, but those who most worried about having a complete schedule were right about having one. Half of our activities (e.g., the boat tour, the carriage ride, the bicycle rentals) required reservations. Even with plans, we weren’t able to get the most treasured permit in the park, which is the predawn pass to Cadillac Mountain. We did get to go up Cadillac Mountain, but it was for sunset, not sunrise.
3. People do get away from their cars. The cliché about national parks is that visitors never get more than a hundred yards away from their vehicles. If true, then Acadia is an anomaly. The rocky shorelines and tide pools, even those some distance from any parking lot were crowded. Entire families, many with young kids, tackled several of the challenging mountain trails. When I biked a twenty-eight mile loop along carriage roads, I was rarely out of sight of other bikers. Most were on ebikes, but they were out there.
4. I no longer consider myself immortal. My family hiked the Gorham Mountain Trail, and the last section that particular loop also serves as the trailhead to a peak called the Beehive. The Beehive is one of the most challenging hikes in the park and includes vertical walls with steel rungs drilled directly into the granite. There was no confusing the Gorham Mountain hikers with the those on their way to the Beehive. The Beehivers were in their teens and twenties, and they bounded past me on the trail as if I was standing still. A few of the teenagers brought along their parents, but even the moms and dads of these young adventurers were twenty-five years my junior. Had I not been with my family, I would have done the Beehive just to prove to myself that I could still do it, but the key point to be made here is that I didn’t regret that I did not try. Five years ago not doing the Beehive would have gnawed at me for the entire trip. Something inside of me has changed. (Now that I am writing about it, I have to admit that it bothers me a little bit.)
Several years ago, my mom and my siblings had to cancel a trip to Yellowstone because of Western fires, My mom has been hoping for an alternate trip ever since. It feels good to have finally done it.
- The first tourist trip was in the Badlands and the Black Hills.
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