Acadia Auto Tour

Self-Guided Acadia National Park Tours

Tour Acadia at Your Own Pace

The Acadia Auto Tour is one of the best ways to get to know Acadia... every time you go there.

We re-take the Acadia National Park Tour every vacation we make in Acadia National Park in Maine. It's just a super way to re-acquaint yourself with all the nooks and crannies along the Park Loop Road and other roads that travel through this wide-ranging park. We love to tour Acadia this way!

The video below will give you a pretty great idea what you'd see. Of course, we wish it was our own faces you were seeing in that video, but that's a goal for our next trip... to take our very own travelogue video.

Enjoy...

Our Annotated Version of the Auto Tour

Click the map for a full PDF version of the whole park

We recommend you invest the few dollars the auto tour tape costs because it's well worth it to tour Acadia that way. It comes with a black & white simple map, but if you'd like a more detailed color map, click the thumbnail above for a full, printable PDF version (it will open in a new window).

NOTE: If you really don't want to spend the money on a tape, you can use the map above and our annotated description of the tour below. But you will miss some of "color" in the narrated version on the tape, not to mention the "BEEP" that always reminds us of grade school filmstrips!

Where To Buy the Auto Tour Tape

As far as we know, the only place to get the Acadia National Park tour tape is at the Hull's Cove Visitor Center near the main entrance to Acadia National Park. But that's OK, because that's where the tour starts.

You used to be able to rent the auto tour tape, but the last time we went to Acadia, they were only selling it... perhaps it was too hard to get people to return the tape, who knows?

We keep calling it a "tape" here, because that's what we have, but these days, you can also get a CD version, if your vehicle has a CD player, rather than a tape player.

Some General Info on the Tour

The Acadia auto tour takes about 4 hours to complete for the 56 or so miles on the eastern side of the island... provided you keep things moving along at a fairly steady pace. (We never do, stopping to hike the Beehive and Great Head Trails, and to picnic on the cliffs along the Ocean Path. We actually take most of a whole day to do our version.)

Here's a few other facts before we get started:

• Parts of the Park Loop Road can be traveled for free, but a toll portion begins after Schooner Head turn-off, right before Sand Beach.

• The Park Loop Road begins and ends as a two-way road, but is a one-way road for most of its length.

• The Cadillac Summit Road is 3 miles long and climbs 1000 feet in the process.

• Sargent Drive, which runs along Somes Sound on the western side of the park, allows no motorhomes or trucks.

Begin the Acadia auto tour on page 2

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