Anchored in Bar Harbor

A winter visit to a Maine resort promises serenity

February 02, 2005|Weekend Planner, Jane Roy Brown and Bill Regan, Globe Correspondents

BAR HARBOR, Maine -- The famous granite shoreline is sheathed in ice, most of the shops are shuttered, and the high-society crowd has flown to Palm Beach, Fla., and Santa Barbara, Calif. Save for cross-country skiers gliding along the carriage roads, neighboring Acadia National Park is all but deserted.

In short, what's not to like about Bar Harbor in winter?

Anyone who has visited Acadia, Bar Harbor, or the smaller seaside villages of Mount Desert Island knows that driving on the island in summer can be a clutch-and-brake nightmare. Winter changes everything. Parking? Ample. Traffic? Virtually nil. Restaurant lines? Hardly, and there is some wonderful food to be had in the off-season, along with plenty of affordable lodging. A spacious room with a gas fireplace and private bath at The Kedge, a bed-and-breakfast in a grand 1870 home in the historic district, costs $85, including a glutton's breakfast.

Besides, with limited shopping, it's easier to focus on Bar Harbor's natural assets, the reason it became a resort town to begin with. Even many people who have never visited Bar Harbor know it by reputation as the "Newport of the north." Wealthy industrialists began arriving here in the 1880s, building mansion-size "cottages" in the fishing village of Eden -- Bar Harbor's name until 1918. Romantic painters such as Frederic Church and Thomas Cole preceded the summer-home set in the 1850s, and their radiant seascapes served as veritable travel posters. By the end of the 19th century, "summer" had become a verb, and Eden's coves were as studded with mansions as Lenox, Mass., and Rhode Island's jewel, Newport. Even today, 75 years after the Depression dropped the curtain on the Golden Age, conspicuously gated driveways disappear into the woods.

A more publicly accessible relic of that glamorous past winds along the town's waterfront cliffs. In the 1880s, when Eden was in its first blush as a resort community, vacationers built a scenic promenade along the shore. Known simply as the Shore Path, it is still well traveled by visitors and year-rounders alike.

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