“You ever been Downeast?” a local asked when I first arrived on Mount Desert Island years ago. It’s an essential question, and a must-know term if you plan on exploring a certain northerly part of Maine.
“Downeast,” an Americanism dating back to the 1810’s, is a sliding scale of remoteness: it literally refers to Washington County and Hancock County, the northernmost coastal counties before the Canadian border, but it’s also an adjective. The further up the coast you travel, the “more downeast” you go. It’s also its very own variation of the Maine accent, and most importantly, it’s a state of mind. Many go to Maine–but the ones with a spiritual understanding of what this state has to offer go Downeast.
At this region’s heart is the surprisingly fabulous hub of Mount Desert Island. (Pro tip: That’s “desert” as in Sahara or Mojave. Mount Desert, one of the island’s four towns, is pronounced “dessert” as in sweets.) Most of the island is covered by Acadia National Park, known for its epic oceanfront cliffs and hiking paths lined with wild blueberry bushes. There are some 18 mountains on the island—the highest seaside summits on the Atlantic coast north of Rio de Janeiro—and the handful of villages around the island’s perimeter are about as charming as coastal New England gets.
It’s also one of the most discreet bastions of American pedigree. Gilded Age greats like the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts had estates here, and Martha Stewart’s iconic Skylands estate is in the town of Seal Harbor. Not that you’d ever know–if glitzy hotspots like Aspen, the Hamptons, or Palm Beach are about socializing, MDI is where the fabulous go to disappear. This unpretentious island is still very much a place where locals greet each other by first name and fishermen sail out before sunrise to pull up their lobster traps. In brief, it’s a perfect microcosm of all the things that make New England so great. Here, our tips for doing it right.
How to Get There
“If it was easy to come here, everybody would,” locals tend to say. The five-hour drive north from Boston is no easy feat, but luckily, Cape Air offers daily service to the island from Logan Airport—so long as you can handle the bumpy, low-altitude flight in an eight-seater Cessna. Bringing a car is probably your best bet, however. That way, you can be free to explore the less-visited corners of Acadia National Park, as well as see all the coastal villages that make the island so special: Bar Harbor, Bass Harbor, Northeast Harbor, Southwest Harbor, and Tremont, to name a few.
New for 2026 is the Acadia Gateway Center, a National Park Service facility welcoming visitors to this part of Maine. It’s located on Route 3 in Trenton, three miles north of MDI. The facility will offer free day-use parking, a bus stop for the Island Explorer shuttle, and an 11,000 square-foot information center with exhibits and information about Acadia National Park. If you need help plotting hiking routes or just want to learn about the park’s history (and the role the Rockefellers played in preserving it), that will be an essential stop.
Acadia National ParkPhoto: Nick Cote / Courtesy of Maine Office of Tourism
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