Do-it-yourself adventure tour

After a short delay to find liquids, we made our way over pine needles, twisted roots, and rocky steps. Thirty minutes into our climb, we could see Echo Lake, the coastal town of Blue Hill, and the Camden Hills rising in the south. Another half hour and we were at the peak, taking in the panorama under a cloudless sky. Surrounded on three sides by the Atlantic, we watched schooners sail past those low-lying islands, the Cranberries. Then we dug into our well-earned picnic food and that sublime Swiss chocolate, which always seems to taste better outdoors.

“The Swiss make the best chocolate because they’re mountain climbers, too,’’ said my daughter, Melanie, 11.

I am on the mailing list of outfitters who send me catalog after catalog of their upcoming trips. Companies like Backroads and Butterfield & Robinson,which once offered only inn-to-inn biking trips, are featuring more multisport trips. This has great appeal for children who grow bored of biking day after day. Curious about this trend, but finding the average per person fee of $3,000 to $4,000 too steep, I decided to create my own weeklong, multi sport trip along the Maine coast for my family of four.

The next morning, after an early morning walk on the Shore Path along the rugged coast that hugs Bar Harbor, we drove on Route 233 to the Eagle Lake parking area. This is the start of a bike loop on a former carriage path donated to the park by John D. Rockefeller. The hard-packed gravel trails are best traversed on mountain bike or hybrid tires.

We biked around the lake counterclockwise, under tall pines and past stone walls covered with patches of moss, all the while peering back at the still lake waters ringed by rounded peaks. Then we started a long, uphill climb and Melanie, who would rather shop than do anything outdoors, was not happy.

Her mother preoccupied her by teaching her to count to 30 in Spanish, and soon Melanie was speeding downhill, a smile plastered on her face, breathing in the sweet fragrance of the pines that seemed to supply the energy to propel her forward.