Day 41 (I think) – Sunday, June 22, 2014

Alexandria, Virginia

I’ve lost track of the days and I left our trip log out in the motorhome, so I’m guessing it’s Day 41.  We’re now at Russell and Carol’s house in Alexandria, enjoying an all-too-brief visit with them.  Just to bring the blog up to date since my last post, here’s a brief recap…

After leaving Freeport, Maine, we spent the next night in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts at a campground in Pittsfield.  It was a pleasant drive across southern New Hampshire and Vermont, re-visiting the area we first visited a few years ago on our first long motorhome adventure after our retirement.  That was in the fall when the colors were at their peak, so it was interesting to see the same countryside in the verdant green of spring.

From western Mass. we crossed over into New York and followed the Hudson River down past West Point, then cut across a winding road to northwestern New Jersey, where we spent Thursday night at Swartswood State Park, near the town of Newton.  The next day we drove south through the center of New Jersey, mostly on Highway 206, avoiding the freeways and toll roads that most travelers use to zip across this state without a second glance.  The countryside was very pastoral, not at all like the usual picture in our minds when we think of New Jersey.  It was slow going, however, as the small towns along back roads such as this are frequent, and as we drew nearer and nearer to Trenton, the traffic increased dramatically.  We took advantage of the six-line superslab to get around Trenton, and were soon in the New Jersey Pinelands, heading toward Cape May.  Our second night in the Garden State was spent at a campground in Belle Plains State Forest, near the town of Woodbine.

The next morning it was a short hop over to the southern Jersey shore, where we plodded our way through the beach traffic for several miles.  We stopped at Stone Harbor for a stroll on the beach – a mile or so – to break up the morning’s drive, then proceeded to the Cape May - Lewes ferry to the Delaware shoreline.  This was the sixth ferry ride of our journey, the others being 1 & 2 - Madeline Island in Wisconsin (two ways, there and back), 3 &4 - Mackanac Island in Michigan (again two ways, there and back), 5 - Prince Edward Island to Nova Scotia, and finally 6 - Cape May to Lewes.  Our plan was to spend the night at Cape Henlopen State Park just outside of Lewes, Delaware, but for the first time on this long trip we were met by a “Campground Full” sign.  The gentleman at the state park entrance gate was kind enough to give us a sheet listing all the commercial campgrounds in the area, so we ended up at one of these.  Commercial campgrounds, especially those near resort areas, and more especially in this part of the country, are not our favorite places to stay since they always turn out to be about 90 percent semi-permanent or “seasonal” travel trailers and 5^th wheels to 10 percent overnighters or short-termers like us.  That is not what we’d consider the most pleasant atmosphere and the main reason we much prefer state parks, national parks, Corps of Engineers campgrounds, and, when in Canada, provincial parks.  Needless to say, we were up and out of there as quickly as possible this morning, making a beeline for the 130 or so miles to Alexandria to spend a few hours with Russell and Carol before moving on down the road tomorrow morning to spend a couple of days with my brother John and sister-in-law Charlie in Columbia, South Carolina, our final stop before heading home to Colorado.

Day 35 – Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Bar Harbor, Maine to Freeport, Maine – 147 miles

Note:  Sorry for the long delay in getting this posted, but we've been staying in a lot of state parks that didn't have wifi.  We're now in Alexandria at Russell and Carol's house, so I'm using his network.

I have no excuse for not writing the past few nights other than I simply haven’t felt like it.  After a while, it becomes a chore, and chores are not what this trip is about.  But here’s a quick recap since I last posted:

When we left Amherst on the 13^th, we entered New Brunswick for the second time.  The first town we came to was Moncton, the site of the shooting of the RCMP officers a couple of weeks ago.  We stopped long enough to watch an interesting tidal phenomenon in the river there, the tidal “bore” as the rising tide comes up the river from the Bay of Fundy, creating a surf-like wave as it advances.  The wave is only a couple of feet high, but there were four surfers out in the river, hoping to catch the wave and ride it up the river.  We saw the wave come around the bend in the river a half-mile or so downstream from where we stood, and watched as the surfers caught the wave and started their ride.  Two of them fell almost immediately, but the other two stayed on the curl until they were abreast of us, then first one then the other lost the wave and fell into the muddy waters – the river is quite muddy, as it was over on the Nova Scotia side the day before.  The land here is red dirt, and the bottom of the bay and the rivers are the same red dirt.  With all the mixing caused by the rise and fall of the extreme tides, it creates a dirty reddish-brown mud that colors the water well-out into the bay.

Leaving Moncton, we drove down the estuary a few miles to the Hopewell Rocks, an interesting collection of standing rock columns that are famous for the stark difference in their appearance at low tide and at high tide.  We arrived at near high tide, so we only saw the rocks as small islets.  Not wanting to wait around six or seven hours for the tide to fall, we were content to let the images in countless photos by others show us what the rock columns look like at low tide when they stand like sentinels off from the cliffs of the nearby headlands.

Continuing further south, we spent the night at a campground on the beach at the small town of St Martins, a few miles north of St John, a large town just north of the US border.  It started raining soon after we went to bed and rained heavily most of the night.  We were, however, able to get a brief glimpse of the full moon rising over the water before the rain started, although it was just through a narrow gap in the clouds.  The next morning we drove down into town and had a real Tex-Mex breakfast of huevos rancheros for me and an egg-and-chorizo burrito for Jeanette.  The restaurant was owned and run by a former Denver police officer and his wife, a native of El Paso.  She, of course, was the source of the recipes for the authentic Tex-Mex fare.  It turned out that Mike, the owner, and we have a mutual friend in Tom Richey, who is also a former Denver police officer.  Tom and his wife Diane were some of the first people we met when we moved to Denver back in 1989.

We crossed the border on Saturday morning, returning to a land where we no longer had to convert kilometers to miles and litres to gallons, making our compliance with speed limits and stress over watching the gas pump climb up to 70, 80, 90 or more litres every time we filled up much less a source of anxiety.  We made it as far as Mt Desert Island, better known as the location of the town of Bar Harbor, Maine, and Acadia National Park, before we put down stakes for three nights and two days.  We were enthralled with the park, its geology, and especially some wonderful gardens, but less so with the town of Bar Harbor, which is a typical gateway town to a popular national park, filled with T-shirt and trinket shops and countless eateries.  Think Estes Park on the seashore, with a cruise ship or two added to the mix, and the wildlife theme being moose and lobster rather than elk and bear.  Ho hum.

The highlight of today was a stop in Freeport, Maine, the home of L.L. Bean of mail order catalog fame.  After an hour in the big factory store, we bought enough stuff to fill up the remaining extra space in our motorhome, so at least we know we won’t be doing much more shopping for the rest of this trip.  

That’s it for now.  I’ll post this when we have wifi, and hopefully will post more regularly for the rest of the trip.  By the way, we’re at 6747 miles now,

June 17, 2014

Lovely evening at Winslow State Park! Jim will write a blog later but will have to wait for WiFi to send it. Temperature is perfect -- only the mosquitoes will send us indoors to our camper for the rest of the evening.

Day 31 – Thursday, June 12, 2014

Gran Pre, Nova Scotia to Amherst, Nova Scotia – 167 miles

We started the day with a visit to the Museum of Acadian Culture, located just down the road from our campsite.  As mentioned yesterday, this was the center of Acadia, which is what the Maritime Provinces were known as before the mid-1700s.  The site of the museum is at the location of the original village of Grand Pre, on a broad tidal flat that was reclaimed by the French settlers by building a series of dikes, much like those in Holland.  I won’t go into the details of the sad history of the Acadians, but briefly, this thriving culture was uprooted by the British during the French and Indian War of the1750s, with the people being forcefully removed and relocated to various locations in the American colonies and back to France.  Eventually, many of these people made their way back to Acadia after many years, and a large number of them ended up in the Mississippi delta region where they’re known today as Cajuns (a contraction of the word Acadian).

Robert Louis Stephenson wrote a story about an Acadian woman named Evangeline who was separated from her husband during this period and never reunited, and the statue of her on the grounds of the history center is a famous landmark.

After leaving the history center, we returned to the river at Port William to observe the high tide coming in.  We arrived about two hours before the peak, and stationed ourselves at a viewpoint on the east side of the river, right by the highway bridge and across from the old wooden wharf structure I mentioned yesterday.  The tide was scheduled to max out at 42 feet plus today, and when we got to our viewpoint the river was flowing rapidly upstream – a very interesting phenomenon.  We noted several landmarks to gauge the progress of the tide – watermarks on the piers supporting the highway bridge, cross-beams on the wharf pilings and other structures on the far side of the river, plus a small gully leading down to the river on our side.  As we watched, the tide-driven river rose probably 10 feet in the two hours we were there, covering first one of our landmarks then another.  As it approached the actual high mark, the upstream flow slowed noticeably and the turbulence around the bridge piers ceased, until finally the only movement on the river were the wind driven ripples blowing across the water’s surface.  We would have liked to stay to watch the tide begin flowing outward, but it was now one o’clock and we had to get moving.

We made it as far as Amherst, Nova Scotia this evening, and are now camped in a very nice campground situated on a small lake.  Amherst is right on the border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, so tomorrow we’ll cross back over into the latter, and will probably be back in the US by Saturday, or Sunday at the latest.  And speaking of late, it’s now 10:00pm and I haven’t downloaded the last two day’s photos, so that will have to wait.

Day 30 – Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Hubbard, Nova Scotia to Grand Pre, Nova Scotia – 171 Miles

Today was a much better day than yesterday.  It dawned bright and clear, and after a good night’s sleep I put the downer day of yesterday behind me.  We decided to drive a little further down the coast this morning before cutting across the peninsula to the Bay of Fundy side because we wanted to visit the town on Lunenburg, another historic, bayside settlement located on the tip of the next bay south of Peggy’s Cove.  It was a beautiful drive over, following right along the shoreline most of the way.  Lunenburg turned out to be a delightful place, a much larger town than Peggy’s cove.  It is set on a sloping hillside with large trees and a small but vibrant downtown area, which stretches for several blocks along three main streets which parallel the harbor front.  The buildings are all from the Victorian era, brightly painted and embellished with lots of gingerbread trim.  We had coffee on the outdoor deck on the second level of an inn and restaurant overlooking the harbor, then spent a couple of hours exploring the shopping district, which had many real businesses, as well as art and crafts galleries in addition to the usual touristy T-shirt and knick-knack shops.  After a light lunch of crab sandwich and a slice of almond cranberry banana bread, we set out toward the Annapolis Valley, which is located just inland from and parallel to the Bay of Fundy on the western side of Nova Scotia’s southern peninsula.

We followed a winding road along a river and string of lakes until we reached the divide separating the Atlantic and Fundy watersheds, then another, smaller river down the other side.  Reaching the major southwest-northeast highway up the western side of the peninsula, we passed through a land of pastoral farms and meadows separated by dense mixed hardwood and pine woodlands.  It was only a few miles before we turned west, down to the towns of Wolfville and Grand Pre, the heart of Acadia, as this part of French Canada was called.  There were two places in particular that Jeanette wanted to see here – an herb and sculpture garden called the Tangled Garden, and the Museum of Acadia, a history center that is part of the Canadian National Parks system and the location of a famous statue of Evangeline, the ill-fated heroine of the story of the same name written by Robert Louis Stephenson.  I also wanted to see the amazing tides in this upper end of the Bay of Fundy, which are well-known as the highest tides anywhere on earth.

Our first order of business was to get checked into a campground so we wouldn’t be worried about that later in the evening.  We found a place called Evangeline Beach Family Campground, located right on the beach a couple of miles west of Grand Pre.  We then went to the gardens, which were bustling with early spring-blooming flowers.  It was a shady haven on a warm spring day. 

Next we went back into Wolfville, a short three or four miles south of Grand Pre, then over to Port William, where the tidal flow up the Cornwallis River averages 40 to 50 feet, depending on a number of factors such as the phase of the moon and what’s going on out in the Atlantic.  It was near low tide, approximately two hours past the actual minimum, when we got there, but I wanted to get a couple of pictures of the muddy river bottom and the tall pilings supporting the century-old wharf on the riverbank for comparison to when we come back tomorrow at high tide.  Being late afternoon, the sun was at the wrong angle to get a good photograph, but after I do a little Photoshop manipulation I think they will be useable.  But that means I won’t be posting the photos for a few days.

We stopped for dinner at a small café on Wolfville’s Main Street, and I had a delicious dinner of chicken primavera with red and green peppers, onions, and broccoli served over penne pasta, and Jeanette had pan-fried fresh haddock with a spinach salad.

Returning to the campground, we had time to take a shower and do a load of laundry before walking across the street to the bluff overlooking the beach to watch the evening high tide rising over the wide beach.  However, the peak wasn’t until after midnight and we were tired from a busy day, so our high tide experience will be tomorrow at noon when we go back to the Cornwallis River at Port William.

Day 29 – Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Hilden, Nova Scotia to Hubbards, Nova Scotia – 121 miles

It was a short day, at least as far as mileage goes.  But it was a tiring and somewhat stressful day, as this was our day to visit Halifax. That meant driving the motorhome into the heart of an unfamiliar city, on narrow streets and through what seemed like a dozen construction zones, then trying to find a place to park that is RV-friendly.  We finally succeeded, though, and found a public surface parking lot that was right where we wanted to be, down on the waterfront.  We spent a couple of hours strolling along the boardwalk that follows the harbor’s edge, right down in the midst of that vibrant city.  There was construction everywhere – not only the aforementioned road construction but a lot of building construction.  There were construction cranes everywhere we looked, with multiple high-rise buildings in various stages of completion.  The economy must be doing well here.

The boardwalk passes through the mooring area for some very large private yachts, both the sailing kind and the motorized kind.  There was one rather old schooner, and one brand new two-masted vessel that looked to be about 70 feet long.  There seemed to be a lot of activity on the latter, including a guy way up at the peak of the aft mast, installing some sort of rigging.  Everything looked brand new and spotless, which was confirmed when I asked one of the crew (or owners) about the boat.  She said they had just taken possession of it a few days before, having picked it up directly from the boat builder just up the harbor.  They were preparing it for its maiden voyage, and gear and supplies were lined up on the quay beside the boat, ready to be loaded.  In the next slip over was a large, modern cruising trawler, which I estimated to be about 60 feet long.  But the real gem was a bit up the way – an ultramodern, gleaming power yacht at least a hundred feet long.  It was flying the flag of a country I didn’t recognize on the stern, and the name of the boat was plastered in polished stainless steel letters on the side of the cabin, again in a language I didn’t recognize.  I can only guess at the cost of something like this, but it must be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  Judging from the array of antennas on the mast, the cost of the electronics alone had to be in the 7-digit range.

Getting ready for the maiden voyage

Getting out of Halifax proved to be almost as much of a challenge as was getting into the city.  We were a little better prepared navigationally, but we hit a delay caused by road construction that must have lasted at least 15 or 20 minutes.  I guess the harsh winters in this part of the world are really hard on the roads, and the crews have to shoe-horn the entire year’s maintenance into the three months of summer.

Our destination as we left Halifax was Peggy’s Cove, a historic fishing village about a half-hour drive from the city along a winding county road, with, of course, more construction.  Peggy’s Cove was one of the “don’t miss” sites recommended by friends who have visited Nova Scotia.  It is a designated world heritage site, so we were really expecting it to be something special.  As often happens, though, when you have high expectations, the reality turns out to be something less.  It may have been because we were tired and frustrated from the stress of working our way through Halifax, but we were both rather disappointed when we drove into the village of Peggy’s Cove.  Yes, it is uniquely situated on a windswept, rocky peninsula; and yes, it does have a picturesque lighthouse; and yes, it does have the prototypical small harbor with a few fishing boats beside piers piled high with lobster traps, and yes it does have several weatherbeaten  shanties along and overlooking the harbor, as well as a few brightly-painted shops along the single road which dead-ends at the lighthouse; but somehow it just didn’t click with either of us. Personally, I was looking forward to finding a photographer’s delight with all the neat amenities I just described, but I guess the combination of my mental attitude at the time and the grey, leaden skies and equally grey and flat water out in the cove just put a damper on the whole experience for me.  To top it off, it began to rain as we drove away.  Here’s looking forward to better days ahead.

Peggy's Cove lighthouse

Peggy's Cove harbor

A patch of color on a grey day