Cape Cod

After all the years of traveling to Maine for Cousins family functions we finally made it down to the Cape. We had a short 50 minute drive to Dennisport from Plymouth and were settled in by 1:00PM.
We headed up the Cape from Waltham to Provincetown which encompasses the entire Cape Cod National Seashore. The visitor's center at mid Cape has a beautiful presentation that explains the ever changing landscape and ecosystem of the beaches, ponds, and salt marshes. It is hard to grasp that eventually the entire Cape will disappear under the relentless pounding of the winter storms off the Atlantic.We did not give the upper Cape the time it deserves so after several detours on the drive up the Seashore we had little time to spend in Provincetown, a whaling center two hundred years ago and now a summer haven of artists and tourists. The community has retained its 18th century look with very narrow streets and alleys and weathered buildings.
The next day was a trip to Hyannis to visit the JFK Museum and memorial and see how the upper crust enjoys summers on the Cape. Jeff managed to brush the curb with a tire pressure sensor that snapped the tire stem off so we had lunch waiting for our road service show up and change the flat that resulted. An hour at the local Honda dealer installed a new TPMS sensor that is attached to the stem and we were set.
Our last full day was a chance to travel by Ferry out to Nantucket Island and spend four hours touring the very busy summer resort before the 1:50 minute ferry back to Hyannis. We took a tour around the Island to get a little background on Nantucket and Siasconset, the fishing village on the SE side f the island that has become a haven for the New York artistic set.The unusual building design in Siasconset include the trellised roofs. The trellis prevents the roots of the vines to penetrate the shingles and damage the underlying roof. Some of the buildings were covered by beautiful vines to the peaks of the roof.The ferry ride was quite violent on the open water because of high winds so we stayed outside on the rear deck. We returned to Hyannis around 6:00PM and headed back to the m/h.

The next day we drove up to Wompatuck State Park in Hingham, Mass 30 miles south of Logan Airport to be as close as possible for Sue's early departure Thursday for Honolulu. After dropping her off and making sure the flight left on time Jeff spent a couple of hours in downtown Boston around Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall having breakfast and playing tourist.

Plymouth Rock

After crossing back into Maine on Thursday we met Jeff's uncle Carroll and Kevin for lunch, picked up our wine and liquor that we had left with them in July and headed for Freeport for the night. We spent the afternoon and evening cruising the stores including L.L. Bean and left the next morning for Kittery, Maine and the malls there. Dinner in Kittery was lobster for Jeff, probably the last of this trip.We have finally shopped ourselves out and are in Plymouth Massachusetts for the night. We spent the afternoon touring the Mayflower II and the Plimoth Plantation, a replica of the Plymouth Settlement and the Wapanoag natives who they interacted with. The plantation was interesting and does a good job of tracing the settlements beginnings.

We will leave in the morning for Cape Cod.

Our Last Day in Canada

Today will be our last day in Atlantic Canada and it marks two months since we crossed the border up at Fort Fairfield, ME to Perth-Andover New Brunswick.
We did do a little sightseeing today by making an early trip at low tide across the tidal flats to Ministers Island, the summer home of Canadian Railway magnate Sir William Van Horne. Sir William was credited with completing the Trans Canada RR and chose St Andrews as his family's summer residence. He purchased the island from Loyalist Anglican Church minister Rev Samuel Andrews' family. Andrews settled the island in 1778 and his residency there gave it its name.

The Van Horne home went through decline at the hands of several owners after the Van Horne daughter, the last of the family, passed away in the 1970's. New Brunswick finally stepped in and named it a historic site and assumed control. It oversees operation by a trust that is restoring the property to its original state.Access to the island is by boat except for 2 1/2 hours twice a day at low tide when you can drive across a sand bar connecting the island to the mainland, which is how we got there this morning. The staff provides a tour and a great explanation of the family history as well as the features of the house and large barn complex.

We were back at the campground by 11:00am where Sue decided to spend the day while Jeff headed back to St Stephens for a round of golf. We had an early dinner in St Andrews and were back well before dark to enjoy a last evening on Passamaquoddy Bay.
Our 62 days in Atlantic Canada have been one of the highlights of our retirement travels and we will enjoy the music, photos, and memories we carry back with us. Our traveling included 3,000 miles in the motorhome, 4500 in the CRV, and six ferry crossings.

We cross over to Calais Maine in the morning.

Passamaquoddy Bay

Being on an extended RV trip as we are can have its ups and downs but today is what makes up for days like yesterday. We really did not enjoy Saint John very much, probably mostly because of the campground and weather but we were definitely ready to leave this morning.

We awoke to a beautiful blue sky and got on the road by 8:30AM to have as much of today as possible to see the St Andrews area before crossing to Calais, ME Wednesday morning to meet Jeff's Uncle Carroll and Kevin for lunch.
We drove about 50 miles down the coast to the Kiwanis Oceanfront Campground in St Andrews that friends Tim and Jan Lynch stayed in a few years ago and Betty Brewer mentioned to us a couple of weeks ago. We came around the corner and saw the campground looking over Passamaquody Bay and knew we had made the right decision in leaving the Saint John area. After checking in and pulling into our campsite looking out across the bay Jeff called Carroll and postponed Calais until Thursday; we just have to spend a couple of days here enjoying the glorious view!We did drive up to St Stephens, the NB side of the border crossing, this afternoon to visit the Ganong Chocolate Museum. Ganong's is a fifth generation maker of candies and boxed chocolates in St Stephens that still make their signature candies like the Chicken Wing, a cinnamon flavored pink, hard candy jacket over a chocolate center that was created in 1885!

Now being charged $4.00 to enter a businesses museum might seem expensive but when they set out trays of their boxed chocolates to sample as you watch videos and tour the museum it gets to be real reasonable, especially after going next door to the Chocolatier and seeing what fine chocolates cost! It was a bad day for weight control but Jeff got the price of admission back several times over!We then returned to St Andrews following the Passamaquoddy River down to St Croix Island, the first French winter settlement in Atlantic Canada. Pierre de Monts and his cartographer Samuel de Champlain chose this small island as their first wintering location while exploring Le Cadie (Nova Scotia) in 1604. Unfortunately they were late getting established and did not consider the consequences of being stranded on the island by ice and a harsh winter. 35 of the 70 men died of scurvy and sickness that winter and caused the party to choose Port Royal as the location of the Habitation the following summer.
We went down to the waterfront at St Andrews for dinner and strolled around the beautiful little seaside town admiring the murals and boats moored in the harbor. This is obviously a tourist destination with golf courses, a large hotel and many good restaurants. We will enjoy our stay here!
The sun was setting as we returned to the motorhome and it is getting quite cool; fall is coming!

Foggy Old Saint John

We are not having great luck in St (Saint) John ('s)! Today turned out just the same as the day we did the city tour in St John's, Newfoundland, so foggy the tour bus driver was telling us to "imagine" what the view was like!We met the city transit tour bus in the campground at 10:00AM and traveled about the city seeing old homes and hearing a brief history of the city and its primary employer and benefactor, the Irving family. KC Irving started in the oil delivery business here in the 1920's and expanded into automobiles, refining, retailing, trucking, forestry, paper mills, and just about any other business that supported his other endeavors.We revisited the Reversing Falls but decided to pass on the boat rides that are available over the rapids. After a few minutes of watching harbor seals catching fish we climbed up to Marcello Tower and saw less than we did last night, nothing but a dim outline in the fog!Our stop at the City Market was a chance to see the roof that is designed as an upside down hull of a boat to carry the winter snow loads. It was a chance to sample the foods and coffee offered by the many local vendors. Brad our tour bus driver also arranged for us to tour the Imperial Theatre, a local theater that had deteriorated over the years as it passed from live shows, to a movie theater, to a church, and then was saved and restored by local citizens led by a cab driver.

We were back in the campground by 12:30PM and had lunch at home. The weather was still dreary so Sue decided to stay in and Jeff headed downtown for the NB Museum a tour of the natural history and industrial-ship building sections of the museum. No photos we allowed even though he skipped the art portions of the 3 story complex.
We headed over to the east side of town for dinner and a movie, two movies actually, "The Woman" for Sue and "A Righteous Kill" for Jeff. We find only a few movies that we both enjoy. We did climb back to the Carleton Marcello Tower for the 3rd time as the sun finally broke through around 4:30PM and allowed a view of the city.
We decided we have seen enough of Saint John through the fog so we are moving down the coast to St Andrews By-The-Sea in the morning before crossing back into Maine Wednesday.

Saint John

We were up at 5:30AM this morning and were one of the first in line at the Digby ferry terminal for the ferry across the Bay of Fundy to Saint John, New Brunswick.. The morning was dry but foggy so we didn't see anything from the time we left the Annapolis Basin at Digby until we were inside the harbor at Saint John and nosing into the dock three hours later.
We are staying at Rockwood Park inside the city. It is convenient to downtown and is a large city park with plenty of space. The campground isn't the greatest but will do for the three days or so that we will be here.We drove around the city center this afternoon and stopped by the Reversing Falls, one of the main tourists attractions in Saint John. The river was near ebb tide so we visited the visitor's information center and decided to return for dinner around 6:00PM at low tide to see the river in its natural state of fresh water flowing to the sea.The Saint John River is not only a big one with tributaries up in northern Maine and Quebec but one of the deepest with a tremendous flow rate at low tide but will stop and flow upriver when the Bay of Fundy 40 foot tide comes in. We will return here tomorrow on the city bus tour at high tide. We have decided to pass on the jet boat ride through the rapids as it is a wet ride and the temperatures are becoming quite cool.

We plan on seeing Saint John on a city bus tour in the morning and visiting the City Market and Museum after lunch.

Our Last Day in Nova Scotia

We spent today visiting two of the primary early settlements of Nova Scotia, the Acadian settlements of Publico and the British community of Yarmouth.The drive down the southwest coast of Nova Scotia is primarily through Acadian communities until you arrive in Yarmouth. Yarmouth was settled by Massachusetts settlers in 1761 and was primarily a shipbuilding/fishing/lobstering based industry. As wooden ships disappeared Yarmouth did maintain a financial base that included railroads and ferry service to the US which is still in place.
We enjoyed a trip out to Cape Fourchu and the Yarmouth Bar to see the lighthouse that is maintained by a volunteer organization that mans the museum, gift shop, and tea room. After lunch in Yarmouth we drove around the tip of Nova Scotia to the oldest continuously occupied Acadian community in Canada, the joint communities of Publico. The area still reflects it's Acadia heritage and customs with displays of salt hay stacks and other Acadian practices including the dikes built to claim the salt marshes for farming.
Jeff satisfied his ongoing curiosity of the Acadian culture of Nova Scotia at the West Publico Acadian Museum where the couple who were in charge were delighted to fill us in on their family's history. Originally settled by Peter Mius d'Entremont in 1651 his descendants occupied the area until being deported in 1755 to Massachusetts and then returned in 1762 and have lived there since. We were told 80% of the residents of West Publico are descendants of Peter d'Entremont.

The drive back to Digby was in drizzle and fog so we are ready to catch the ferry in the morning over to Saint John New Brunswick and hopefully sunny weather.

Back to Annapolis Royal

We started out this morning for Port Royal to finish our tour and stopped by Bear River to see the town on stilts at high tide. Being back on the Bay of Fundy seems to make these comparisons part of the visit.
We spent the day strolling around Port Royal and visiting Fort Anne, the earliest military fortification in Canada and one with a history of confrontation between the French and English as they fought for control of North America.The Officer's Quarters have been turned into a museum of Port Royal's long 400 year history and was very interesting.
We returned to Digby early and have spent a relaxing evening at home after dinner at a great local restaurant, The Captain's Cabin.

Change of Plans

We were headed for the west end of NS and Yarmouth this morning but last night decided to drive north across the peninsula to Digby and use it as a base of operations for the next three days. Sue has found several stops she would like to make east of Digby and this will allow us to spend an extra day in that area. We will still drive down to Yarmouth and Cape Sable Saturday in the CRV and return here that evening.

We had a relaxing drive across Nova Scotia with little traffic and decent roads. We arrived here around 12:30PM, hooked up and had lunch, and then headed back east to see Annapolis Royal and nearby Port Royal, the second European settlement in North America after St Augustine, Florida.
On the way we stopped at Bear River, the village built on stilts. We are back on the Bay of Fundy with its 40' tides and Bear River's level rises and falls twice a day. We arrived around 3:00PM near low tide so the building construction was exposed. We plan on stopping by in the morning near high tide to see the change in the river.Our next stop was the Annapolis Tidal Power Project that provides 40 megawatts of power a day, 1/10th of Nova Scotia's consumption, by trapping the water above the dam at high tide and releasing it at low tide over a set of water turbines that generate the power. It is a great demonstration of clean renewable energy that is reliably generated twice a day. It needs a means of stroage to be a complete solution to the Provinces power needs.Designed by its surveyor Samuel Champlain and settled in 1604 The Habitation played an important role in the settlement of Nova Scotia (Le Cadie or Acadia). It was fought over first by different French interests and then changed hands or was attacked 8 times in the next 140 years as France and England fought over the New World.
Interestingly the construction of the current Habitation site by Parks Canada was instigated by a Massachusetts resident, Harriet Taber Richardson who believed that since Jamestown colonists had destroyed the Habitation on a raid in 1608 that the US should raise the funds to restore it as a historic site of Canada. The Associates of the Habitation did raise funds and eventually sparked interest by Parks Canada who reconstructed the Site in 1940.
The Habitation was built not as a fort but by commercial interests as a fur trading post with the Micmaq Indians. The accommodations were quite comfortable and most of the residents were support people who maintained the facility and performed housekeeping tasks.Leaving the Habitation we drove another 10 miles or so west on the peninsula to the east side of the Digby Harbor entrance. At this point we were 4 air miles from the campground and 38 road miles from home! The weather was perfect and we could also see New Brunswick 50 miles away. We returned to Digby for dinner around 6:00PM and called our daughter Laurie to wish her a happy birthday, on 9/11.