Back in Canada!
Lobster traps line every dock, at all times of the day.
A great hike along the beach at Harbour Rocks, at Cape Joli Head, Nova Scotia. The water was so clear, maybe a little cold to us western wimps but very blue and clear!
Yes, it is rocky!
Smoking some little Kippers.
Digby Scallops and Fish and Chips, we love em!
Lobster boys mark traps in season and the walls of sheds in the off season.
In the Bay of Fundy the tide the difference in high and low tide can be up to 12.5 metres and over 1/3 of the bay floor is exposed at low tide, it is one of the largest in the world.
Cape Split on the northwest side of Nova Scotia does exactly that...split. Off in the distance you can just make out the shores of New Brunswick.
To get an idea, Ken is standing beside a bank lined with seaweed that would be underwater at high tide.
Alma Lobster Shop is the place to go for great lobster. You can buy them cooked, they will make them ready to eat by breaking up the shell for you (they will even supply butter and picks). Ours was not this big (7 kgs)! We wish!
Pictures perfect small towns in PEI.
Ken gets a taste of farming.
We had some on the most amazing camping spots, this one is at Cape Meat off the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia.
What a great summer job portraying the folks that lived 400 years ago in Fort Louis-burg.
Not all days were sunshine.
Monte Gros Morne in the rear. We hiked the 16 km and 806 mt. in just under 6 hours, return.
There is great hiking in Newfoundland, Rob took us to this viewpoint located just outside Cornerbrook.
Did I mention we loved the lobster? We tried it in Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland.
The puffins at Ellison possed for us in front of their burrow/nest. They are a way too cool looking bird.
Gannets nest on the rocky cliffs of St. Mary's bay. Beautiful and so very elegant.
Along the way as we hiked around Signal Hill we stopped for a photo with Fort Amherst in the background.
Mailboxs depict the colourful rowhouses in Halifax.
Westjet flew us home a beautiful sunny day. Even if we couldn't drive home across Canada we got to see a lot of it from the air.
After a great tour in Europe, S.E. Asia and Iceland we decided it was time to come home to Canada. Heinz sold our trusty Honda Africa Twin in Germany and we came to Canada with plans to buy a couple of bikes or maybe a van in which we could camp our way home across Canada. Neither one happened as we were not able to buy, register and insure any type of vehicle(except new)without a permanent address, the only thing we could get would be a transfer permit that allowed us to travel from point A in Nova Scotia to point B in Westbank...directly...that wouldn't do! Sooo. What to do? Rent a car...let someone else worry about all that stuff, so that is what we did, a different way to go for us but it turned out great. Using our camping equipment from the bike and buying a few odds and ends like a cooler and some extra pillows, blankets and cooking supplies we hit the road for a 5 week tour of the Maritime provinces. In Nova Scotia, New Bruswick, and P.E.I. we drove a Chevy Cruz and in Newfoundland in a Toyota Corolla, we would have stayed with the Cruz but the company we rented with wouldn't let us take it to Newfoundland so we traded it in and Enterprise gave us a way too good a deal on the Corolla, they even let us pick up the car in Halifax and drop it off a St. John's, Newfoundland with only a $125 drop-off fee(unheard of according to a couple of other rental car agencies)! We purchased a cheap flight, St.John's to Kelowna, which left 5 weeks after arriving back in Canada...and so the new saga begins.
Only 7 1/2 hours after saying good-bye to our dear friends in Germany we landed in Halifax with a detailed description in hand of how to get to our soon to be friends and fellow couch surfer's place in the heart of the city. Ray and Chantel opened their house and lives to us for 3 days, they were great hosts and made us feel totally at home. So as discribed above we started out to explore Nova Scotia and shortly realized it was kind of nice travelling with a car, mainly...room for a cooler to keep a few groceries and room for a few luxuries like jeans and sweaters for the cooler weather (something you just can't do on a motobike) these we found at yard sales as we went along. The yard sales were fun in themselves as we got to meet a few locals along the way, let's make a deal. It was also nice to be able to have campfires at night, we bought some cool fire logs to carry with us, made from compressed shavings. We visited the usual tourist spots in Nova Scotia; Peggies Cove, Digby (for their famous scallops...yum, yum), Luninburg with the Blue Nose 2 and the Bay of Fundy, not to mention many provincial parks. We slipped into New Bruswick as we ventured to the north of Nova Scotia and spent 2 days visiting The Flowerpot Rocks and trying a little of the lobster in Alma before leaving the rain behind us (New Brunswick was the only place we had to get a motel due to bad weather) and moving on to P.E.I.
We totally circumnavigated P.E.I. visiting places like Summerside, The North Cape, Cavendish, East Point, Georgletown and Charlottetown. Of course we had to try a few P.E.I. potatoes, tasted the salt air blowing off the shore, went to a local theatre production and ate lobster dinner in the basement of St. Anne's church. We arrived across the Confederation Bridge and we left the same way five days later.
Just under three weeks down and we returned to Halifax to exchange our Cruz and pick up the Corolla that we would take to finish up touring the northeast of Nova Scotia and continue on to Newfoundland. After the switch of cars, a quick stop to say hi to Ray and Chantel (our couchsurfing friends) and to stock up on a few groceries at Costco, we were off again. The last part of our tour in Nova Scotia was the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton, we had been looking forward to this because we had heard so much about it from other tourists. Once again, we were just a little disappointed and thought the trail didn't quite stack up to all our expectations...maybe we have seen too many beautiful areas that we tend to compare other places to? I don't know. Anyway...let's talk about the roads. OMG, we found most of the roads in the Maritimes horrible, I really hate to say it but it is true...we were glad to be driving a rent a car!
We took the ferry from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, and in about 6 hours and $200 later we were in 'love at first sight"! Coming from Iceland we found a similarity between the two even though Newfoundland is located mainly below the 50th parallel and Iceland above the 60th. Apart from the lava fields in Iceland, they both had short stubby trees, lots of wind, and a type of boggy tundraish vegetation. Even though we had been worned about all the moose and having to be very careful driving the highways we only saw one moose on our whole trip and that was in Gros Morne National Park and at a long distance! Cornerbrook was our first stop. Rob, a friend from Mission, B.C., was at home in Newfoundland visiting his mom and invited us to stay with them. What a treat! Rob was able to give us the low down on the area, taking us on several hikes and also to a local theatre consisting of traditional songs and stories about the area. And...his mom made us a lobster dinner! You really have to love it! On leaving Cornerbrook Rob came with us to Gros Morne N.P. where we hiked Gros Morne mountian, 806 m., oh what a view! That night it was off to Rocky Habour and another show which I can honestly say rivalled any Irish Rovers show from back in the day! If you are there you MUST go. Leaving the east coast of NFL behind Ken and I set out on a mission to find icebergs and puffins. In Twillingate, iceberg alley, we were informed that it was not a good year for the bergs and we wouldn't be seeing any locally...crap! We missed seeing puffins in Iceland and we refused be skunked again, off we went from Twillingate to Elliston and the Puffin Festival. Yes, we saw puffins and from there we travelled south to Cape St. May's where the fog parted for us and we were captivated by the gannets, nesting on the cliffs. Finally, we arrived in St. John's in time to visit Signal Hill and walk the famous George St.
We dropped off our rental car a couple hours before our plane left and once again the people at the rental desk couldn't believe what a great deal we got from Enterprise in Halifax...knowone is ever allowed to rent a car in Nova Scotia and drive it to NFL. All we could do was smile, for once, just our luck! The plane ride was a quick 3 1/2 hours to Toronto then 4 1/2 hours to Kelowna, read a little, a couple of drinks and a snack...and Bob's your uncle...home again!
