It's hard for me to summarize how much Mount Desert, and this house on it, mean to me. The place is a center of my sense of myself and my family. I grew up in learning to know this place; coming back here is communicating with the traditions, memories, and histories that have generated the habits and outlooks by which I know who I am. It really is the case that the *place* binds and holds the spirit together.
More practically, I can't think of any other place where it's possible to do so much that's so rewarding so easily. Mount Desert is just *made* for vacationing--for serial enjoying and adventuring in reasonable, daily, family-sized chunks. Everything you'd ever want to do is within twenty or thirty minutes of your home-base; and it's all completely authentic and accessible.
We've spent weeks hiking day after day, non-stop, hopping all over the island, never exhausted, always eager for the next pondside vista or rocky scramble or heart-wrenching, ocean-yearning view from the top.
Other years we went slower, and spent lots of time tossing stones at the cove, and reading books by the fire, or doing puzzles at the card-table. It's hard to say what's more wonderful: breaking through the treeline atop Sargent Mountain, or wrapping yourself in the fog on the tide-stripped rocks of Mitchell Cove, or reading by the fire with the rain dripping down the pine boughs. The best visits are when you do all three!
As a parent of two children, quite young when they first visited, I really appreciated how the activities could be scaled to the age, energy, and interests of the group. It was fantastic at first to have Wonderland available, to make a simple out and back over flat land with an eight and a five-year-old. Or, when they were feeling whiny, to take the Jordan Pond loop trail, with popovers waiting at the end. Now it's fantastic to string mountains together and come home at sunset.