PEI Playground

Prince Edward Island was a very fun playground for several days. We stayed at a perfect B&B in Charlottetown and used that as our base for our time there, which included...

-- Visiting a potato farm! (Another crazy connection: in the next condo building over from my grandma in her Florida retirement community, there's a couple who lives here who I met when I was visiting in January, and they are connected to these PEI potato farmers.) We even got to ride on the tractor, as we happened to be there on a planting day. It was such a surprise to see the inside of the tractor cab crammed with computers, including a GPS function that steers the machine to make the rows totally straight. And then we got to see the warehouse from which they're still distributing last year's crop.

-- Visiting the tiny seaside town of Victoria, where unfortunately we witnessed the aftermath of a fire in a candle-making shed. On the plus side, that means the the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were on the scene, and apparently my mom has a thing for the RCMP. They were flattered by her fascination and let her try out the patrol car.

-- Making the typical pilgrimage to Cavendish and the childhood homestead of L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, and the adjacent property, which she visited often and made the setting for the books. It really was as idyllic.

From there, we spent several hours wandering the beach at Prince Edward Island National Park at Cavendish. In the pictures I've seen of this place, it's draped in people lying blanket to blanket all summer, so it was amazing to have it entire to ourselves. Literally, we didn't see another person on the beach. The tourist season here really doesn't get started until early-to-mid-June. We were lucky to be a bit early.

-- Making an abrupt (due to me slamming on the brakes when I saw it) at a goats' milk soap company, and even got to feed one of the baby goats who'd been abandoned by its mother.

-- Biking the Confederation Trail. This is the thing to do in PEI, and lots of people bike the entire length of the island, which is relatively small and flat but still a multi-day trip. We picked the 11 km between St. Peters Bay and Morell, which was plenty for us. If you try it, beware that you are not allowed to cross-country ski, shoot a rifle, ride a horse, or...open a tin can? on the lovely trail.

And then it was time to leave PEI, hopping on a ferry...

...Nova Scotia-bound!

Fun-Fun-Fundy

Let's see...last we talked, I was on my way to Saint John, New Brunswick, to fetch my mom and her friend D from the airport there. With my car packed so extremely to the gills that any sudden braking was likely to cause a luggage cascade that would sure decapitate some unfortunate passenger, we set out on our long-planned Maritimes adventure. First stop: the Bay of Fundy (pronounced "Fun-day," as we've learned). This bay, which separates New Brunswick from Nova Scotia is renowned as being the place where the highest tides in the world are regularly logged.

I've learned enough about tides during our time on the bay to have a new appreciation for how complicated they are (affected by the sun, the moon, and the geography of a given shoreline) and to know better than to try to explain it all here, as I'd never get it right.

First, we explored Fundy National Park. My mom and D (hereafter to be known as "Dartha," an amalgamation of their names) had both forgotten to bring water bottles, so pose here with the Canada moose water bladders they bought at the park gift shop before we set out on a hike to Dickson Falls.

After the falls, we visiting Shiphaven Cove and walked down to the beautifully forlorn beach there.

That night, we took advantage of the longer hours of daylight and the low tide scheduled for 7:30 p.m. and visited Hopewell Rocks. It was closed, but the sign at the entrance said "Enter at your own risk" rather than "Do not enter." Uncharacteristically, my mother suddenly declared, "Sometimes the best adventures are the riskiest adventures." So we parked outside the gates and walked in. SO worth it, as we had the following view totally to ourselves:

With a healthy respect for how fast the tide can come in over such flat ground (apparently faster than a galloping horse, we've heard anecdotally), we took our adventure a step further and started flouting signs that clearly said not just "enter at your own risk," but "CLOSED." Which is how we got the famous Hopewell Rocks "flowerpots" all to ourselves.

The next day, we took to the sea with a kayaking trip that ended up being a little too intense; after only about 20 minutes out on the open ocean, the swells were so high that whitecaps were forming and the guides, when in the trough of a wave, could not see us clients. In the purposefully calm tone of voice professional tour guides use when they don't want to alarm you but need you to obey them immediately, they told us to turn around and head back to the estuary. Which we did. Those were definitely the most intense waves I've ever kayaked in, which was a fun experience, but it was also kind of intense, and I was relieved to head away from the swells and back to calmer water.

Though it was no longer on the Bay of Fundy, we did have one more New Brunswick adventure before leaving the province. On the beach at Irving Eco-Center, north of Bouctouche, we met an Acadian couple digging for cohogs. They were both adorable octogenarians, delighted to give us the low-down on clam-collecting and their favorite clam pot-pie recipe.

Sweet!
And very satisfying goodbye to New Brunswick before we pointed our car toward the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island.

To Canada, With...Rain

The day I crossed into Canada, it was raining when I woke and didn't stop, really, for about three days. Soggy? Yes. Happy, still? Yesser! This was the view for most of my drive through Maine into New Brunswick.

Just before crossing the border, I stopped at the St. Croix Island National Historical Site. The larger island on the left in this picture is St. Croix (with Canada visible in the background there), where Champlain and his cronies established the first French settlement in the new world (pre-dating Jamestown by just a few years). It failed (if you can call half the men dying from scurvy when the island got iced in for the winter a failure) but Champlain et. al. then finally heeded the advice of the friendly Passamaquody Indians who'd been telling them all along that the island wasn't a great idea, moved across the bay to Nova Scotia, and tried again--with a better outcome. Champlain eventually went on to such glories as founding Quebec City, so it sounds like it all worked out in the end.

From there, it was on to the border crossing at Calais-St. Stephens, where every question the Canadian immigration official asked me opened a new can of worms. "How long do you plan to be in Canada?" "When do they expect you back at work?" "How are you paying for these months of travel?" "Where do you live, then?" "Are you carrying any personal protection, such as firearms or mace?" My attempt to be truthful and explain having quit my job to travel indefinitely and now living in my car because I no longer had an apartment in Colorado to match my license plates but that my family in WI would give me a place to stay when I returned seemed only to provoke more confusion. It didn't seem wise at that point to joke that I had a very large, sturdy walking stick with which to defend myself from attack by Canadians. Eventually he gave up and let me in.

Traveling tip: If you cross the border here, take an immediate right, go down the street a few blocks, and check out the Ganong Chocolate Museum, where your entry ticket includes all you can eat of their specialty chocolates.

From there, I drove down a little peninsula to the town of St. Andrew-by-the-Sea, which I wanted to visit because everyone I asked about it sighed and said it was lovely. The rain made it less than appealing to explore, but I give two thumbs up to Honeybeans coffeeshop, where some of the chairs had red fleece lap blankets draped over them for customer use. What more cozy way could you treat a rainy day?

From there, up to the college town of Fredericton, aka "Freddie." Couchsurfing with some local grad students absolutely made my experience there. In less than 24 hours, with them absorbing me completely into their lives, I got to (1) play trivia at a local student bar, (2) watch for the first time what might be the worst movie EVER MADE (Vampire's Kiss), (3) have breakfast at a hole-in-the wall Belgian waffle place, (4) visit the Fredericton Farmer's Market (THE place to be on a Saturday morning), and (5) try bouldering at the basement rock wall of the campus sports center (no pictures of that, for better or worse. Couchsurfing at its best, for sure!

Too soon, it was time to bid farewell to Freddie and head south (via the scenic-as-promised Hwy 102 from Gagetown to Evandale)...

...to Saint John, where a puddle-jumping plane was bearing my mom and her friend D to join me for a long-awaited Maritimes adventure. Stay tuned!

The Maine thing is...

I've neglected the map for awhile! If you can see the yellow highlights, those are the tracks I've made around the northeast the past month+. All leading into Maine!

I didn't have a ton of time in Maine, so stuck to the coast and stopped in Acadia National Park--which I knew, from a visit nearly 15 years ago was a slam-dunk. I can't remember exactly what parts of the park we visited when I went there with three of my friends my last year of college, but this time I hiked up Gorham Mountain from Sand Beach and then took the Ocean Trail back to my car.

Some brave soul went all the way into the water, but it was chilly out, and I can only imagine how cold the Atlantic was. I didn't even take my Bogs off.

Being on Sand Beach was the first time in the visit when I felt jolted into remembering that I'd been to that exactly place before, long ago...when it was apparently just as chilly (though fall) but much less cloudy and misty out, at least at times.

After hiking, I continued northeast along the coast to Pembroke, where an awesome CouchSurfing host let me stay in this fantastic cabin on her property, complete with outhouse, outdoor shower, and chamber pot. LOVE IT.

As if that wasn't enough, she made us Maine lobster, caught that day as locally as you can get.

We also had another very local dish: steamed fiddleheads, given to me by my previous night's CouchSurfing host in Bangor.

Tummy full of locavore delicacies and a soft rain starting to fall outside the screen windows of the cabin, I fell asleep for my last night on the States-side of the border, my cell phone already picking up Canadian signals and Atlantic time....