Maritiming

We made our way out of New Brunswick by following the coastal tourist route marked by starfish signs at every turn. “Starfishing” was an adventure and we saw lots of lovely little square box houses and neatly mown lawns at every turn. The most interesting house of all looked like a ship, masts, furled sails, bowsprit and all! No time to stop and take photos though. Sorry. Everywhere we went they were flying the Acadian flag consisting of vertical stripes of blue, white and red with a yellow star in the blue one. Such a solidarity of spirit.
Eventually we made it to the really really long Confederation Bridge over to Prince Edward Island. Our 8th province! Yay!

This is the PEI side. As you can see the soil here is really red. And yes, they do grow a lot of potatoes here! Also grains, hay, sunflowers and sweet corn. The island is mainly farms with some hardwood harvesting and of course, growing oysters and lobster fishing. So far we haven’t managed to get any lobster but keep missing the boat, so to speak. Interestingly the islanders are quite environmentally aware which makes sense since their economy is based on the land and sea. Plus all the tourism they can lure.
The first night on PEI we stayed at Cedar Dunes Provincial Park on the East Point. We had already glimpsed this part of the island from the New Brunswick shore but it was a long way around to it! The beach is on the Northumberland Strait and naturally had the iron-stained red sand.

The West Point Lighthouse is black and white striped and has a museum, store and inn attached. Lots of people were relaxing on the beach and swimming in the relatively warm water. The Flat Rats liked the Flat Rocks so they made a sandwich:

While we were resting up after our beach walk the seagulls decided to do some elaborate aerial acrobatics. Next thing I knew they had tried to add something to my wine glass! Ewww…

Good thing they missed.
Next day we decided to try the island’s north shore at Cavendish. PEI tourism definitely gets a lot of mileage out of their famous author Lucy Maud Montgomery and her Anne of Green Gables series. Virtually everything anywhere near PEI National Park has some kind of link. First we visited Green Gables, which is really the house of relatives of her grandparents and apparently inspired the story.

After viewing a short video on LM Montgomery we visited the garden, the barn, the house and took a walk down the Lovers Lane and around the Balsam loop. The house was furnished in period but some things were just a little off. This is part of the sewing room:

Fellow textile enthusiasts will notice the poor spinning wheel was missing a spoke and the sewing machine was in a dreadful state. We won’t even talk about the lousy skein of thick commercial yarn with one knitting needle sticking out of it which I didn’t include in the photo. I guess museum people aren’t completely up on their textile stuff. Or good enough is good enough for most tourists. However there were a couple of nice red and white overshot coverlets on the beds and a lovely knitted lace shoulder shawl plus some very passable hooked rugs everywhere so it wasn’t all sad. I know. I should enjoy it for the effect not the lack of absolute truth. Right.
Later we got a campsite near the beach and went for a long walk on its red sand. I loved the red rocks (of course!)

And the tiny sea shells along with the colourful seaweed:

This is what I call a “texture shot”. The Flat Rats found an inukshuk to play with:

I don’t know what they did to it but the minute I picked them up and turned around, it fell down!

I swear we barely touched it! Ooops. No, we didn’t even try to rebuild it. Someone else can have that pleasure.
It started raining just about the time we were turning around to go back. It was a long way so we were glad the rain didn’t amount to much.

The campground beach is in the far distant line at the top of this photo. It was about 3.5K return and then – the rain stopped. Just enough to get us damp and make us walk quickly. Sheesh.
Next we’re trying a different section of this long narrow park. We travelled along the shore road and stopped at one or two of the spots along it. I love this point covered with cormorants and one heron (which we saw with our binoculars in the middle):

The white is many layers of guano on the red cliffs. Happily while we were there we saw one of the local red foxes, a youngster out hunting his lunch:

It didn’t even notice we were there in the van so I got this shot through the window. Then we went south and around to the next-easterly part of the park called Brackley-Dalvay. We got a nice campsite in the white spruce and took our bikes along the paved trail that parallels the road toward the inn of Dalvay-by-the-Sea:

This house was built as a summer home by a rich American businessman and is now a part of the national park. It’s quite handsome and I got a kick out of riding my bike through the portico where once horse-drawn carriages stopped to let off guests.
Next it was off south through a foggy morning, going by Charlottetown and down to the ferry at Wood Islands to take us to our 9th province, Nova Scotia. We saw what we suspect were porpoises off the ferry and a bald eagle on the PEI side. (ETA: They were more likely pilot whales!) Here’s our first view of a Nova Scotia lighthouse at Caribou.

Tried sending this from the line-up while we waited for our ferry but the connection was too slow. Then I tried sending from the Timmy’s in Pictou but it was too weak to connect. Tried to send it from Whycocomagh Provincial Park in the middle of Cape Breton, NS, but that didn’t work either. BTW I have it on local authority that they pronounce it “why-COG-amah” and it’s on the side of the Salt Mountain above the Bras d’Or Lake which is really a minimally-tidal salt water series of inlets and bays.

We went exploring and here’s the teeny beach across the highway from the campground. And look what we found, a totem pole from BC! The only one in Nova Scotia.

It was carved by a Patterson McKay of the Greenville Band (now part of the Tsimshian First Nations) and gifted to the information centre near the Canso Causeway onto Cape Breton in 1971 for our BC Centennial. It was retired here to Whycocomagh PP in 2008 to be allowed to go back to the land. However far we get from home, we can still find a piece of it unexpectedly.
Currently we’re at the Highland Village Museum in Iona. But more about that later. I need to FINALLY get this posted. Off again to see more of Cape Breton!

Peddling In New Brunswick

Well, we’re still here in Kouchibouguac National Park in delightful New Brunswick. Apart from the bugs we’ve been having such a lovely time we actually stayed 3 nights! A first for this holiday. Luckily the bugs can be survived by a combination of our Mosquito-Free Zone behind my, ahem, ingenious netting and the really nasty bug spray with 90% DEET. That, my friends, is the only damn thing that works. The pitiful 25% stuff is useless. I think the rats have been using it instead of us:

Frightening thing is I do believe I’m actually getting used to the smell of repellent. Is that a bad sign?

It dumped rain along with thunder and lightning the first night here. Even though we had the awning out, my bed got a bit wet before we could move the netting and shut the door. Not a big deal however, especially since the rain had stopped by morning.

Not that the sky didn’t look a little ominous anyway. Later after breakfast we went on a really long ride (for us anyway) of about 25K. There are fabulous bike trails here, nice and wide and well-signed. T’s electric assist controller was wet from the rainstorm so it wouldn’t work. We forgot to cover it after the last time! Doh. So he did it all without any help. Even though I had my assist I was still tired by the time we got back. We walked out on the boardwalk over the lagoon to Kelly’s Beach which is out on a sandbar.

See what I mean about the ominous sky? It was absolutely lovely to smell the salt water again. This is the Gulf of St Lawrence so not quite the Atlantic Ocean yet – but close. We walked along the sandbar for quite a way:

 

We saw lots of sandpipers and a couple of grey seals poked their heads out of the water offshore. No sign of the rare piping plover who nests on these sandbars though.

The lagoon is lovely:

And it even had a heron fishing, just like they do at home. He/she’s that teeny dot in the water near the middle of the photo.

We continued around the bike trail but it started raining just as we were passing some large teepees at Callendar Beach. We and another cycling couple dove for the relatively dry spot just as the rain started pelting down in earnest:

We ate lunch on the benches in the teepee and chatted with the other couple who were from St. John while we waited for the rain to stop, which it did – right on cue. Amazing really. If this was home it would be raining for days!

Today it was cooler but sunny – absolutely perfect weather – so we went out on our bikes again in spite of the fact that T’s controller still wasn’t working and my battery is nearly dead. We have to get a campsite with electricity because the converter doesn’t have enough juice to charge such a big battery. We went along the Kouchibouguac River for about a 13k round-trip.  The river has a rich red-brown water:

The forests here are mixed hardwoods and conifers: pine, birch, maple, spruce, tamarack and a whole lot more that are harder for me to identify right away. We found a baby sugar maple that had been planted in memory of someone:

He obviously used to tap the maple trees for syrup because the title on the sign was “tree of life”. So poignant.

We’re in our 4th time zone, Atlantic Daylight Time, and tomorrow we’re off to our 8th province, Prince Edward Island. Not to worry. We’ll be back to New Brunswick very soon. We haven’t seen the Bay of Fundy yet. And have I mentioned how much I adore the cheerful, helpful, friendly New Brunswick people? Plus I totally envy the way everyone we’ve met so far can switch from French to English at the drop of a “hello” in response to a “bonjour”. It’s amazing. I swear this is the most successful blending of our two official languages in the whole of Canada. NB should be commended.

PS Sorry I haven’t really been able to reply to comments. With the flaky internet connections we’ve had, we’re lucky to get anything at all. However I’ve been reading them when I can. Glad you’re enjoying my…er, the Flat Rats and their travelogue! Next post from Wherever. À bientôt!

Au Revoir Quebec – Bonjour/Hello New Brunswick

Yes, this post comes right on the mosquito-bitten heels of the last one.

Today we drove from Quebec to New Brunswick and then across the whole province from Plaster Rock to Miramichi and then south. That is Grand Sault/Grand Falls, the site of our lunch break. It’s a small city with both a French and an English name and apparently 80% of the population is bilingual. That’s so refreshing after translating all the signs for T in Quebec. No, I can’t understand the speech. Just read the signs. I learned Parisian French in school and there’s no comparison. The accent is much too different, not to mention the 40-some years since I took French. Beyond rusty into incomprehensible.

I have to say the people here in New Brunswick are so kind! We got a fabulous chat and booklets and maps from a lovely lady in the welcome centre in Edmundston, right after we crossed the border from Quebec. And then we got another nice bilingual lady who helped us here a the welcome centre in bee-ooo-tee-full Kouchibouguac National Park. . The rats felt welcomed too. Here they’re helping decipher the map:

I hated to tell them these weren’t actual “real people”. Flat Rat wasn’t convinced:

That felt so good! 

The park’s name is pronounced something like “koo-shee-boo-gwak” but with a soft “k” at the end, almost not voiced. So far it’s a really nice park with hot showers, wash areas and free, accessible and fast wifi right from our campsite! Total yay! I’ve already gotten the fridge and cooler cleaned out and washed up. I also managed some blog posts (so far) and although it’s hot and humid, it promises to rain some tomorrow. It already has just a little. The only thing that brings this lovely place down is the mosquitoes which are nuts. Sorry, Nancy. The clip-on bug repellent only works if you stay still. Right. Sure. Oh, and if you actually (you know) have a belt to clip it to! He does. I don’t. And we need to watch out for the poison ivy here. Again. We don’t have this stuff at home so it’s not automatic. But ask me about stinging nettle… At least one can make yarn and fabric out of it!

We’ll be here for at least a couple of days so expect more. We really need a rest after travelling constantly for so long. We’re finally in the Maritimes! Whoo-hoo!

Bye Ontario – Bonjour, Québec

We’ve had several adventures since I posted last. It somehow seemed to take a very long time to drive across from Lake Superior to just before the Ottawa River on the eastern border of Ontario. We went through several towns, large and small, which made us go slow more often than fast. We caught a glimpse of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay and the not-nearly-as-large Lake Nipissing. Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park was quite nice especially on a hot day. Our campsite was in deep woods all by ourselves. We didn’t manage to see any of the three kinds of turtles in the park even though we went walking by the lake at dusk. The bugs were only semi-annoying. Believe me – that’s a compliment.

Next day we continued down the Ottawa River valley into Ottawa. We drove around downtown for a while until we managed to score a very tight-fit metered parking spot not too far from Parliament Hill. The rats would like the Prime Minister to know that they have some helpful suggestions for him so he can govern our country much better. Hint: Not a fan.

Sadly I don’t think he was listening. Maybe he wasn’t home? The big scare was when we got back to the van and it wouldn’t start! After all this time of running fine. What to do? We had to move all the luggage and bedding from the back where the engine is located as well as take off the bikes so T could look at it and see if it was anything obvious. Nothing. A call to the automobile association produced Mario and his truck in less than 40 minutes. He had the poor thing hoisted up and us loaded and off to the local Volkswagen dealer in a jiffy. Totally worth the membership fee! This was just freaky.

The shop couldn’t promise to get to us right away but they must have heard my wail about how our home was in our van and my loudly-expressed notion to camp in their parking lot until she was fixed! Three hours later, a new starter coil was installed and we were back on the road across the bridge and into Quebec. Great service above and beyond for what really is a rather ancient vehicle. We also asked the mechanic to try to fix the possibly-loose clamps causing the gas leak in the overflow but he said wasn’t able to reach it without dropping out the gas tank. Not happening out here! However it  hasn’t leaked since so he did something magical. We didn’t even mention the speedometer that broke the day before so no more cruise control. We can live with those little problems. The van hasn’t even had an odometer for years. We have no idea how far we’ve actually gone in total. It’ll be fun to try to add up an estimate later.

After the Dead Van Incident the trip to the Parc National d’Oka was very long and we were very tired by that point. Regardless we took the slower but much more interesting route, among the little French-Canadian towns with delightfully old buildings. We drove into the twilight with a big full moon and then into the dark that was splattered with a zillion bugs on the windshield. I was getting nervous that I wouldn’t see the brown signs for the park but we eventually found it. Hot and sticky and tired we got a campsite in the dark, managed to negotiate our way to it down a maze of dark gravel ruts. Our 6^th Province!

This park was not a hit however. A squirrel or chipmunk managed to sneak in under the mosquito net in the middle of a hot and sticky night and T chased it out. Then we had to close the door which made it even hotter. The rampant raccoons we heard would have probably tried to come in next so it was a good decision anyhow. The dirty washrooms and poison ivy absolutely everywhere decided us on leaving the next day even though we were still tired.

The trip from Oka past Montreal and into Quebec City went fine. As usual it was tricky finding parking at a meter on the street but we lucked into someone leaving. We can’t park in the underground lots because we’re much too tall, especially with our Black Box in the well on the top. On foot is definitely the way to explore the old city. The roads are totally wacky. They obviously never benefitted from the Royal Engineers who laid out Vancouver’s mostly-sensible streets!

Here’s the lower city from above.

And one street in the upper city.

The Flat Rats decided that they liked one of the crenellations in the city wall best for the view. Old Quebec has the only city fortification wall north of Mexico. Very cool.

The city was truly fascinating (even if the shops and restaurants didn’t interest us) but we ran out of energy after a couple of hours of wandering about, climbing battlement walls, checking out the old buildings and narrow streets and ogling all the other tourists. You really can’t see everything! We decided to carry on to Montmagny on the other side of the St. Lawrence and about an hour further east. Got a piece of grass with a view of the river in a private campground. It’s quite a lot nicer than Oka! Even has wifi.

The view of the St. Lawrence from near our camp spot in Point-aux-Oies (Point of the Snow Geese). To the left out of the photo there’s also a river that falls in to the St. Lawrence over a small dam that totally disappears after the tide comes up over it! Who’d a-thunk the tide could come so far inland.

Addendum:
OK, I take it back about this campground! The yahoos near us decided to let off fireworks just about the time we were trying to go to sleep. Worst of all, the wifi was horrible and this post didn’t go through in 20 minutes of trying. I will explain all in the next post coming shortly.

Ontar-Eye-O-Eye-O

OK, even though I have yet to see a blackfly, I can’t stop singing the song about North Ontario. I’ve seen enough mosquitoes to make up for the lack of blackflies though. I am one big puffy damselfly. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Aren’t damselflies supposed to eat the mosquitoes? No? Pitui.

We caught our first real look at Lake Superior at a rest stop on the highway.

It’s even bigger than Lake Winnipeg and looks like the ocean but it doesn’t smell the same. Incredibly beautiful though. Unfortunately we got a bad ding in the windshield from a rock thrown up by a big truck on the highway. Hopefully it won’t spider out too much until we can get it fixed. Hopefully it will behave itself until we get home. The nice Speedy Glass man said that it might crack further if he tried to fill it with epoxy. The last time this happened was on the Alaska Highway quite a number of years ago and it was scary. This one felt like a gunshot. It nearly went all the way through the glass.

We camped at Neys Provincial Park on the lake’s north shore. We did some much-needed laundry at the “comfort station” and I hand-washed all our hand-knit socks.

I don’t think they are going to dry anytime soon so we’ll probably be dragging them around for days! While the laundry was drying we hiked up the Lookout Trail over the Canadian Shield rocks. It was a challenging trail but the view was so worth it.

The most interesting trees here are the birches with their peeling bark.

We’ve seen several different kinds of birds too, mostly warblers. We even saw my first blue jays this morning. They aren’t nearly as deep indigo blue as our Stellar’s jays but still very pretty. I just wonder what the botanists would have called them if they had seen Stellar’s first? Besides birds the only other wildlife we’ve seen are red squirrels and chipmunks. Plus the big horned beetles. One even landed on my arm and made me jump.

After dinner we went for a long walk on the shore. Who knew that there were waves! We can hear them from our campsite. And a sandy beach. T even found me a shell of a freshwater clam.

Even though there are no tides the shore is sculpted by the wind and the waves. I felt like I was in Oregon instead of Ontario.

This theme continued the next day. We woke up late (6:30am EDT) but saw a bear on the highway as we left Neys which would be the only sighting of interest all day. We drove around the head of the lake and south through Lake Superior Provincial Park where we stopped to check out the ancient Ojibwe pictographs at Agawa Rock.

The trail down was difficult and rocky and trying to see the rock wall with the pictographs was worse. We could only see about half of them because you had to balance out on the slippery rocks just above the waves. There was an interpreter stationed there to help answer questions but I wished there were more handholds! Loved the Misshepezhieu, the “Great Lynx” who controlled the waters: lynx head, horns, spiky mane, and a long spiny tail.

The Flat Rats are showing what it looks like better (on the sign where it’s safe):

Here’s the canoe:

The loop trail went between close walls in a deep rock split. The temperature noticeably dropped in what was really a roofless cave. The cool was very welcome after all the scrambling and balancing! This is the view point where the trail doesn’t go:

Yes, there’s a huge rock stuck in the crack.

We got into Pancake Bay Provincial Park rather late but there were still plenty of campsites. The beach is long and sandy and looks just like one in Oregon except that it’s not salty. Unfortunately the mosquitoes are the worst yet and we have no immunities so puff up quite badly. Need to use the bug spray more but can’t decide whether it’s even worse than the bites! The bug net is getting even more of a workout than it did in Manitoba.

We walked along the beach (me with my feet in the water) quite a long way to the north. Found a little rock pile:

So we added a nice flat one to the top:

Of course we ate pancakes at Pancake Bay before we left. Today we’re on our way straight east to Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park on Ontario’s east side. We went through Sault Ste Marie and eventually saw part of Lake Huron, our second Great Lake. Now we’re outside a Timmy’s in Sudbury. It’s hot and sticky and there’s still a long way to go. Best eat my donut to keep up my strength, huh?

Counting: 5 Provinces - Ontario

The land changed when we drove into Whiteshell Provincial Park at the eastern edge of Manitoba. There were lots of rocks and lakes and trees which segued neatly into Ontario and the beautiful Lake of the Woods.

We stopped at Kenora, a city formerly known as Rat Portage, for groceries and also beer and wine at the liquor store. The rats wanted to know why they changed their name from a perfectly nice one to some native name they can’t understand. They wanted a portage! I told them they were always being portaged everywhere. Silly critters.

Got a campsite at Sioux Narrows on the lake and went for a hike up the Lookout Trail. Not much trail and not much lookout. It’s hotter than it has been so far today and we were both very happy for a beer when we got back to camp! There wasn’t much in the way of wildlife around here (apart from the whitetail deer, little brown frogs and the laughing loons) but there was a beautiful huge spider on the window of the washroom. Including its legs it was as big as my palm. So beautiful.

Next morning at the crack of dawn we were off to find the next campsite at Kakabeka Falls, near Thunder Bay. We drove south along Lake of the Woods and many other smaller lakes then east to Fort Frances near the Minnesota border were we got gas. Then carried on again east through the rocks and forest and lakes of northwestern Ontario. I actually thought that Rainy Lake which began next to Fort Frances was even prettier than Lake of the Woods. There are so many little islets and bays on these lakes. They are so different from our British Columbian ones that are usually more of a long narrow swelling in the rivers. These lakes are made by water caught in basins that can’t drain out because of the impermeability of the rocks. There are little cabins perched everywhere. Each lake has a name and they kindly put signs on the highway so we can know them better.

The signs that tickled my warped sense of humour best though were these ones every few kilometres:

A grumpy-looking tiptoeing moose along with the the words “Night Danger”. I kept picturing a moose sneaking up on us in the middle of the night ready to pull off some nefarious deed. As long as he’s not after my yarn! Haven’t seen any moose though since Riding Mountain in western Manitoba.

Kakabeka Falls is right near the city of Thunder Bay on Lake Superior. The falls are quite spectacular and there’s a convenient boardwalk on either side and over the top so you can get lots of perfect viewing.

We walked a little way along the Portage route beside them as well. The rats were still looking for the Rat Portage but this was Jacques de Noyon’s Mountain Portage that he traversed in 1688. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to carry heavy loads up the trail past the falls as the voyageurs did! It was very hot today and it was enough effort just to carry me – and the rats.

This very pretty waterfall is also used by Ontario Hydro to create power via an underground conduit. They can actually vary the water volume over the falls and they let the most out on the weekends when tourists are more likely to view it. Also the right amounts for the lake sturgeon when they’re reproducing at the base of the falls. Even on an August Friday it’s still very spectacular.

On to Neys Provincial Park on the north shore of Lake Superior. We’re currently making use of the free wifi at the Nipigon Visitors Centre. A large green caterpillar just landed on the picnic table from the tree above. At least he didn’t puff on a hookah and ask “Who are you?” Then I’d really be down a rabbit hole!