An island idyll

The reason we headed through Bangor and toward the coast was because there's one of very few national parks on the east coast here.
Acadia National Park is an oddity as far as American national parks go as people actually live here. On the whole the parks are vast expanses of ageless wilderness in which you could clearly get lost backpacking in and no doubt be eaten by a peckish growling animal. Here it's more like the Lake District. There's a couple of established towns and a road linking them to and around the island, on which the park is based. It's an island linked to the main land via a small bridge so it's not exactly a triumphant paddle steamer of a river crossing.
National parks here are great, there's no denying it. As soon as you enter one you get a good feeling. A feeling that you really are miles away from some of the most boring towns of existence known to man.
Acadia is picturesque, resplendent in deep greens and all the while you can see the blue Atlantic and the odd smaller island just off shore. For some reason I'd completely omitted this place in my travel diary and I just can't think why.
We drive the ring road around the island and take walks on rough beaches and cliff edges. The sun is out but the Atlantic is still whipping an icy breeze around us. A short circular walk takes us to the top of the highest point, Cadillac Mountain, and we're rewarded with great views and windburned faces.
We stop overnight in one of the main towns, Bar Harbour, in a flash old looking whiteboard hotel. Reasonably priced too. The town itself is fairly sleepy but has a couple of streets worth a stroll to look in the specialist shops leading down to the harbour itself. Food is mainly way out of our price range here so we again settle for a Subway sandwich. But at 8 o'clock the town was shutting down so unless we wanted to pay gourmet prices it was the best on offer. I keep forgetting the annoyingly early nights in the U.S. Nightlife of any sort is massively limited. There would be an uproar if even a Leyland pizzeria decided to shut at 8pm, besides it would be commercial suicide.
In the morning we take a stroll along the water's edge by another grand hotel and then up past some large houses of the millionaire type. Apparently, Bar Harbour was a popular getaway destination for the rich in Boston, Philadelphia and New York and hotels used to be scarce. In the 50's the hotel we stopped in was build and many more followed shortly after to accommodate the influx of wealthy city dwellers. After a fire wiped out a lot of the town only a handful of hotels were rebuilt and instead the rich folk from the city built grand mansions on the cliff edge. To a point you can walk along the edge through some of these extensive gardens until a wire fence prevents any further public infringement on rich mans property. You can see why the decided to do it though. The sea is still a constant vivid blue and the ever pounding water against the rocks provides a soothing relief from city life.
We've entered into a land where American towns look like they do in the movies. It wasn't all a lie. These towns were settled many years before their western counterparts and all posses a white church and pointed steeple and sprinklings of well maintained residential homes with hanging baskets and pristine gardens. Far from the half derelict shacks over the other side of the country.
We leave Bar Harbour and Acadia National Park to pass through more picture perfect towns along the coast with more and more British names, Belfast, Camden, Newcastle, Bath and so on. This got me thinking that maybe this is the trade off. The west has fabulous landscapes of unparalleled beauty and plain awful towns whereas the east is far more populated, thus being a bit short on natural beauty, but well kept and pleasing towns. Hmmm, we'll see.