Set the alarm for before 8:00, since we had to trailer to horses over the Acadia and wanted time to get a good ride in. We had them loaded up and heading over a little after 10:00. Took a wrong turn on the road, though, and ended up going toward Bar Harbor (at least we got to see some of it), and also managed to find a post office that accepted both my letter and my UPS package, so we got a couple of chores done on the way. We finally arrived at the Brown Mountain parking lot, which I had been told would be large enough for horse trailers, but that wasn’t exactly true. The lot was pretty full, and it was too small to turn around in, but we did manage to park along one end of the parking lot, out of the way, more or less. We saddled and booted up, and headed out on the famous carriage trails, built by John D. Rockefeller in the early 20th century, and known world-wide for its’ amazing bridges and roads. Most of the footing was very small pebbles, and every road had a row of beautiful and useful rocks along it on both sides, as well as draining ditches, which meant the road had excellent footing, as expected. We probably didn’t really need boots, but better safe than sorry. We headed out, and at the first intersection I asked Hubby where he wanted to go, he said, “Down to the beach”, so we turned right and started following signs for Seal Harbor. Not surprisingly, the intersections were well-marked, with both road signs and post numbers which corresponded to the map. Lots and lots of lovely loops here, and I can’t say enough about the incredible bridges! Real works of art. We went down to Seal Harbor, only to discover it was just a parking lot, across from which we could sort of see the ocean, or bay, or whatever it was, but there was no access to the beach, as it was a part of that rocky shoreline for which Maine is so famous. We then headed east to follow a road around the bottom end of Long Lake, then turned north to loop back around. The weather was absolutely perfect, the roads spectacular, the horses were brilliant and willing the whole way. We got in many trots and a few canters (Hubby did more canters because his mare is still favoring one of her back legs on the trot, though it is improving) and plenty of walking. We were happily surprised to find that much of the park is hilly, even mountainous (from an Eastern point of vew). We thought that being an island, it would be mostly flat like most Atlantic-side islands seem to be. We ended up riding for exactly four hours, just over 10.6 miles, longer than we’ve been doing but since we figured this would be our only day to ride (there’s rain in the forecast for tomorrow), we wanted to make it a good one. It certainly was! The weather started to turn, with the wind picking up a bit as we packed the horses up in the trailer. On the way back to the campground, though, we simply had to complete our downeast Maine experience with lobster, so we stopped at the Downeast Lobster Pound for a fabulous, sloppy, finger-licking good lobster dinner. For $15 each, we got a 1 lb. Lobster, a huge ear of checkerboard corn, some coleslaw and a roll. We also got a hot chocolate to warm us up while we waited in the restaurant for our number to be called. It was delicious, though like all lobster, it was time consuming, which we figured was good, we would burn off calories as we were taking them in, so it might be a net weight loss in the end (not… : -). Once we cleaned ourselves up after that, we headed back to camp, fully satisfied that we’d had a most memorable day!
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