The bad news is that my Fly12 card didn't have enough memory for the entire 30-mile ride and overwrote the most scenic stretches* of Park Loop Road. The good news is that the entire Cadillac Mountain ascent and decent were the files that did the overwriting.
I'll spare you most of the shaky, plodding climbing segments. Blogger has a 100 mb limit anyway.
Starting from the hotel, the route I mapped was 30 miles. From town to the road up the mountain is 18 miles with about 1600 feet of elevation gain. It's a gradual upward grind on Route 3 to the first real hill at the the Sieur de Monts entrance to Park Loop Road. The entrance goes under Route 3 and climbs out. I was coming around the bend onto the loop road when a cyclist rode past. I had enough speed to catch up to him and say hello.
"Good morning!" He didn't have a mirror.
"Oh! Dear god!" He pulled a headphone out of his left ear. I'd startled him. "Where are you from?"
"New Jersey. You?"
"Here!" he said.
"I'll stay behind you then," I laughed. Being a Jersey cyclist, there's no way I'd ride up here, where drivers come from all over the country on roads with little or no shoulder, without a mirror. Never mind the headphones. That's just stupid dangerous. As we climbed the first hill he started to pull away. I caught up long enough to say "Nice warm-up" before he got ahead of me again, this time far ahead. He must have turned on a side road, gone even faster, or both, because after the hill at Sand Beach I lost sight of him.
I was taking my time, conserving my energy, and climbing the hills at about 7.5 mph, when, somewhere past the Bubble Rock trail entrance, I heard from behind me, "Hey! Jersey Girl!"
It was the headphone local again. Did he just fucking lap me? I'm not the fastest cyclist out there, but I'm not that slow, am I?
"Are you going up the mountain?"
"Already did!" Of course he did. "I gotta get back to work." He sped off, I mean really sped off.
I'm not proud. Here he is, flying past me:
There are two switchbacks. This is near the first. Being on the inside of the curve is comforting.
The last mile is after the last switchback. It's a little steeper, but again, that's not the problem. The edge of the world is ten feet to the right.
Here's Miss Piggy at the summit:
What took me half an hour to get up took ten minutes to get down. Here the video isn't wobbly. I was coasting
and grabbing the brakes. Look how close I am to the center line. There was a very patient SUV behind me. I gave them a thumbs-up at the bottom of the hill.
I coasted most of the way back, and, save for a couple of small hills, I was hammering in the big ring when I did have to pedal. This is what Bar Harbor looks like at 1:30 p.m.:
I took a few minutes to gaze at the harbor before crunching up the shore path to the back of the hotel, stopping under our room.
We spent the rest of the day in town. We got a cheap lunch at The Independent, an overtly leftist cafe, where hatred for Governor LePage is on full display:
Someone else has been taking the same pictures that I have:
We went to the Abbe Museum, a small place that features the history and crafts of the Wabanaki group of Native American tribes (Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot). They take basket weaving to a new level:
We went to the two used bookstores in town, and I perused the tacky gift shops for moose paraphernalia. I'll only buy utilitarian moose now, unless I find a plush one with more panache than any we have at home that survived the great moose purge. None made the cut; I wound up with socks instead.
Once again, late at night, I tried to get pictures of the moon over Frenchman Bay.
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