Following Obama's Footsteps!

WAVEJourney.com contributor, Marlene Nadle, shares her recent tales of following Obama's footsteps through Bar Harbor, Maine.

Following Obama's Footsteps ~
Fall was crisping the air and winter wasn't far behind when I finally followed Obama's vacation footsteps to Bar Harbor, Maine, the historic home of Society's 400.

I was still surprised that the former community organizer went there in the summer to bike on carriage roads created by John D. Rockefeller Jr. Of all the places he could have selected, he chose a vacation whizzing around the edges of the old establishment.

He may have picked the place because of one good thing the old guard did. They donated land and created Acadia National Park with its spruce trees and granite mountains running down to the sea. The park was the first stop for Obama, his 30 bicycles, family, secret service men, and staff all peddling past Witch Hole Pond.

To follow his trail I, being a sedentary type, took one of the free propane-driven buses that wind along a 27 mile park loop. It only let me parallel Obama's path with peeks through clearings rather than track him more directly on the broken stone carriage roads. Buses and cars have been forbidden on the carriage roads since they were built by Rockefeller in 1913. He didn't think much of the automobile and, perhaps, of the riffraff starting to drive the newfangled machine.

Other wealthy summer residents led by Harvard President Charles Eliot as early as 1901 began to assemble parcels of land for public use. They wanted to preserve the beautiful natural setting and their playground. They feared developers and loggers would cut a large swath through the trees. As a Maine politician once said, The portable sawmill created Acadia. In 1919 it became the first national park east of the Mississippi. Its size has expanded ever since to its present 47,000 acres.

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Happy Travels!
Viv and Jill
AKA: WJ