Days 9 & 10

The last two days of our trip were fairly uneventful.  We drove the rest of the way through Maine, through a bit of New Hampshire and through Vermont, then into Eastern New York before driving back into Ontario.  We did a little shopping and took a few photos, but mostly we just wanted to get home.  I was starting to feel genuinely ill, and I was thoroughly sick of taking pictures--I'd taken over 1,000 in the last eight days!  (No telling how many DH took.)  I was wondering if I'd ever want to hold a camera again!

We took pictures of much gorgeous scenery:

Ran into some truly dismal weather (And that's saying something, considering the weather we'd already hit on this trip.):

And saw the tail end of a fall festival in Burlington, Vermont:

It was thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly exhausting, and I'm  SO glad we did it!  We will definitely visit Newfoundland  next summer!


I expect our next big trip will in all likelihood be the move back to Texas.

The Rest of Day 8

After the tide chased us away from Hopewell Rocks, we continued our journey back.  Next stop was in the hometown of a friend of ours.  In the foreground you can see the town's famous covered bridge.

She gave us clear directions to where she grew up, but we got a little lost, so we're still not sure we got the right house!  Is this it, Angie?

 

If so, it now comes with a dog.  :)

We're fairly sure we got the correct high school, at least according to the locals, it's boarded up now, and it got to late for us to look for the new one.

 We drove into Maine late in the evening.  It was too dark to get a picture, but the Maine woods really ARE creepy at dusk.

We were so exhausted by then that we basically stopped at the first hotel we found.

Day 6 & 8 - Hopewell Rocks

I'm determined to finish this before moving on to anything else!

We visited Hopewell Rocks, a tourist site on the Bay of Fundy, while the tide was in on Day 6, and then again when the tide was out on Day 8.  It was truly amazing.  (If you want more info you can check it out here, as well as any number of other sites.)

Some of these pics are tide in/tide out pairs, some of them show us exploring what is the ocean floor half the day.

These are the actual rocks for which the site is named, right in front of the steps leading down from the land above.

 

To give some scale, here's one with people walking there.  As you can see, the water would be well above their heads at high tide.

Here are the steps you climb down, when the tide is OUT, of course:

 

This pic of my DH shows how chilly it can be down near the water.  (He almost never wears a sweater or jacket.)

 Here's a back view off those steps.  Notice how dry the sand looks in the tide out pic:

 

 We spent most of the afternoon wandering the "ocean floor" with our fellow tourists.

There are dire warning signs all over the place to make sure you don't get trapped somewhere and drowned at high tide:

And a safety platform about halfway between the two access points, just in case.

These are quite scary, actually.  They certainly made us keep our minds on the clock!

All in all, it was an extremely impressive natural display. You can see those tides come in and out all around the bay.  In narrow places it looks like a fierce whitewater river flowing first one direction then, a few hours later, the other.

Well worth the time to see.