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.

Day 7--Halifax

(I'm not skipping Day 6, it's just being delayed to go with Day 8.)

We decided there was so much to do in Halifax that we wanted to devote an entire day to it, instead of just the evening we'd originally planned.  That, and we had some extra time due to the Newfoundland thing. . .

After driving into town, the first place we stopped was the Citadel.

With its historic artillery,

impressive costumes (even if the actors are bored, lol),

and commanding views of the city and the harbor
.

After we left there, it was well past lunch time, so we headed down to the waterfront.  After all, we were in Halifax, so we felt we MUST try some seafood.  It was a gorgeous day, so we ate outside and then wandered down the waterfront.

  

 We visited a couple of museums, including the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, where we saw many interesting, impressive, sometimes disturbing things.

One of them was a deck chair off the Titanic:

 After the museums all closed around five or six, we headed back to the hotel to rest up. We were really looking forward to enjoying the Halifax nightlife we'd heard so much about!

 Boy, were we ever disappointed!  We got back downtown around 7:30, only to find out that most businesses closed at around eight!  This includes pubs, music venues, and many of the restaurants!!!  Not to mention tourist attractions, of course!  Granted it was a weeknight, but GEEZ!  Eight o'clock?  You've got to be kidding.  This was worse than PEI!

We managed to find a restaurant that was open until (gasp !) ten, and were quite lucky to do so, as we were starving by then.  Afterwards, we headed back to the car, since everything else seemed closed.  We took a few night shots along the way:

(You can just see me sitting between the 1 and the 2.)

As we got to the car, we heard faint strains of music.  Interested to see what was open at this ungodly hour (of 8:30 or so) , we followed the sound to a bar that was still open!  We spent a very fun and  pleasant hour or two at a place called the Lower Deck.  A live band (Signal Hill) was performing covers to a standing-room-only crowd.  And no wonder, since it was the only place open.  (Don't get me wrong, the band was really good, but I can't believe it didn't have something to do with the hour.)

At least we got some sleep, if only due to the enforced early night, as we were planning to get up at dawn the next day.

Day 4 and 5 - Quebec, New Brunswick, PEI, Nova Scotia, and NOT Newfoundland

The next day we drove through the Eastern edge of New Brunswick, on our way to Prince Edward Island.  This morning was the last time we were dry during the rest of our trip.  Starting about noon, it rained, and rained and rained!

 

We did stop at one of the many covered bridges along the way,

  

more beautiful scenery,

and, of course, different moose warning signs.  :)

Way too late, well after dark, we crossed the Confederation Bridge into the province of Prince Edward Island.  Then we spent another hour and a half wandering around on back roads in the dark thanks to our guidebook giving us the wrong address to our lodgings for the night.  Fun, fun, fun.

In our cottage, we stayed up even later discovering that we'd missed by ONE DAY the ferry we'd planned to take to Labrador/Newfoundland.  This meant, that unless we did nothing but drive the rest of our trip, we didn't have time to go that far.  It was upsetting, but we comforted ourselves by making a firm plan to fly there next summer.  One way or another, we WILL see it!

On the morning of Day Five, we woke much too early to check out of our cottage and check out our location.  Our first daylit view of PEI was the red cliffs of Cavendish Beach.

We went on to get our infamous fox pics

and then drove into Charlottetown to see Confederation Hall.

Before leaving the island, we had to see the famous PEI buffalo herd:

We left after dark, taking a ferry to Nova Scotia.