The latest calculations are that we put in more than 20 miles in today on our rented bikes, mostly over the national park’s gravel carriage roads.   We stuck to the trails described to us “more moderate,” and while we expected these to be flat and gentle, they turned out to be a fair bit less moderate than that.

Looks flat but is probably uphill

The carriage trails are lovely, wide, shaded trails, but owing to the nature of the terrain in this part of the world, they are not really flat.  Lovely, but rolling with hills.  On many of the hills some or all of us would have to dismount and walk our bikes up.

It was a hardship that seemed bearable when we  were driven by the promise of a large ice cream sundae inside an even larger popover at the Jordan Pond House, conveniently located at the farthest point in the Tri-Pond Loop we were executing today.

On the far side of Jordan Pond, we could practically taste the popovers.

This thought kept us pedaling along rather briskly for most of the morning up and down the undulations of the landscape, though at one point on a particularly long climb, we all got passed by a jogger.

Deflated troops after a bag lunch in a lovely setting

While we did see all three ponds gleaming magnificently in the sun, we didn’t actually ever get to latch onto any of those popover sundaes.  The darned line at the Jordan Pond House was just too long, and, probably due to coronavirus restrictions, it seemed not to be moving at all.  The hill-climbing jogger would have passed this line like it was standing still, because it was standing still.

Popovers, no; wild blueberries, yes

It was a difficult decision to make, but we ended up just eating our bagged lunch and refilling our water bottles several times at the Jordan Pond House before making our way through the rest of the loop.

Many a strategy board game loss was avenged on the adventure golf course, mateys.

One concession for the missed confection was to head almost directly to an adventure golf set up we saw yesterday on the way into town.  We headed back out there almost as soon as we returned our bikes to the rental place.

The line for golf was long, too, but at least it moved.  We opted to play the easier, original course and cruised right along once we got our clubs.  The going was much slower on the flashier new course.  Then we headed downtown to make up for lost ice cream and also to have dinner.

We even managed to break our beer fast at dinner with a sample flight of various Maine brews.

See, it all works out in the end.

Well, we managed to go a whole day without drinking any beer.  Somehow.

We covered a lot of ground and saw a lot of brewpubs — it is Maine, after all — but we didn’t settle in for a pint, even to share.  Here’s what we did do:

On the Waterfront Trail in Bangor

Jen and I satisfied our suspicions that Bangor is a walking-friendly city by following two separate urban paths, the Kenduskeag Stream Trail and the Waterfront Trail, only to discover that a tiny sliver or our morning walk was also a tinier sliver of the East Coast Greenway.

And the East Coast Greenway

The Greenway connects 15 states. After this morning’s walk only 14 more to go!

As it turns out Bangor is more than friendly, It is a borderline fanatical stalker of walking.

To our benefit, of course. We are walkers.

Jen and I managed to do all that — and to not stop in for a pint at the Sea Dog Brewery on the waterfront — by 10 am, and we got everyone out of our downtown Bangor loft by 10:30.

This gave us plenty of time for adventure as  we explored more of Downeast.   We got to Mount Desert Island well before it was time to check into our new accommodations, so we sidled up to the Acadia National Park Visitors Center,  then  hit downtown Bar Harbor for some pizza.  And even then we still had time for adventuring before Air B’nB would be ready for us.

First we hit one of the crown jewels of the park, the vertiginous Beehive Trail, with its steep climbs aided by iron rungs, railings and bridges.  This was a little too much to bite off the last time we were here.  Lanie was six and much more likely to fall off than she is today.

The warning sign at the trailhead is bracing but   we all took to the trail like we had sticky spider powers.  Nadia was most of the way up before she realized how little she liked where she was.

Jen navigates an iron bridge.

The views from the top — actually there are views all throughout the trail if you look up from the iron rungs — took in the green of the trees, the grey of the rocks and the blue of the ocean, with dramatic waves of white fog closing in dramatically over the islands to the northeast and encroaching on Great Head and the Sand Beach.

By the time we made it down the back way, via the gentler Bubble Trail, we were hot enough to brave the Maine waves.  We joined a surprising lot of people in the frigid water for a late-afternoon cool down. Happily, the fog seemed to hold off from the beach and we enjoyed the warm sun as soon as we got out of the water.

Not a bad way to pass the time before our rooms were ready.

The evening was calmer.  We moved into  the second floor of a victorian close to downtown Bar Harbor.  The place is also a short walk to a supermarked where we provisioned with lunch items and even fixings for a dinner in.   Follwing that, some of us took advantage of the low  tide and walked across the sand bridge in the harbor to take in the sunset, along with a few score of our fellow tourists and a deer that apparently decided it didn’t want to be on Bar Island anymore.

On the sandbar

Still no beer, though we did pass an open brewpub on our way downtown for ice cream.  And while some of us stayed behind for the sandbar walk, everyone was in for the ice cream trek (though Jen eventually decided she’d rather get something from a bakery we passed).  I got homemade Maine blueberry softserve.

And off the island

We are still trying to follow safe practices, and we have not actually been completely sequestering in our house for quite some time, but this is our first blog-worthy, whole family adventure since Nadia’s big birthday trip. We’re in another state, even.

Maine obligingly lifted quarantine orders for New Hampshirites several weeks ago.

Aside from escaping cabin fever, we are also are planning to acclimate ourselves to Zoe’s soon-to-be new home on the U Maine Orono campus.  Jen and Zoe are the only ones who have seen the campus; they squeezed in a visit mid-March just as the school was shutting down.

Before we could get there, we undertook some retail therapy, and maybe even below-retail therapy at the outlets in Freeport.  The LL Bean factory outlet, Old Navy, and the Nike store all benefitted from our visit.  We also managed to visit our first microbrewery of a trip that promises many more microbreweries.  Maine likes its craft brew.

This broke the drive up into nice, manageable chunks.  An hour-and-a-half to Freeport; a few hours of shopping; then an hour-and-a-half drive to our final destination of the day: Bangor.  Aiding the drive was  a very ineresting RadioLab episode about the long-term effects of the 1918 Pandemic.  Did you know that both Ghandi and Hitler got career boosts from the Spanish Flu?

Bangor turns out to be charming city combining aspects familiar to us from our stomping grounds of Dover and Portsmouth.  It’s a fair bit grittier than Portsmouth and a few notches hipper than Dover.

Texting whoopie pie menu and expecting a rapid response

Dinner on Bangor’s Market Square. The restaurant makes its own beer.

Bangor lumps both those places together, with an ample sprinkling of microbreweries — we’ve found four here without really trying — and a mix-in of whoopie pies.

Jen has found us a nice, central Air Bn’B apartment, and later she figured out how to text the whoopie pie bakery menu to the girls and collect their order.  (I opted for the “Down Easter,” which has molasses cake and blueberry cream filling.)  Jen’s a hero of this trip.

She was rewarded with a round of Terraforming Mars before road weariness took its toll on all of us.

Tomorrow we visit Orono.