Leaving New Brunswick
2011/09/14
Today was mainly a driving day.
I stopped at the town of Hartland for a break, and saw their claim to having the world’s longest covered bridge:
I also noticed the first sign of fall colors today, which works out elegantly since part of the reason for the timing of my trip was the hope of seeing some reds and yellows on the trees during my return trip.
Not much else to say about today, but I remembered a few other things I wanted to say on other days:
Atlantic provinces, you like traffic circles a little too much. I like the single-lane traffic circles we have in some residential neighborhoods in Vancouver and other cities – they generally work better than having stop signs everywhere. But out here there are two- and three- lane traffic circles and they’re used for important intersections, and I find them confusing and dangerous.
Also, stoplight durations are way longer here than in the western provinces.
Secondly, I really like a lot of the place names in the eastern half of the country. Richibucto. Bouctouche. Manicougan. Chibougamau. Shubenacadie. Rustico. Pictou. Doak. Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! (seriously). Temagami. I think the eastern tribes’ languages tended to induce some pretty nice names.
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The Right Coast and Homeward Bound
2011/09/13
Today I woke up to find Halifax shrouded in fog:
My plan was to catch the 1pm ferry to Prince Edward Island, so I hit the road as soon as I could. Modulo a delay searching for a gas station, and picking up something to eat later on. I ended up being lucky; I arrived at the ferry terminal just as the boat was docking, but still managed to get aboard.
The ferries here are smaller than the ones in BC, but still have a pretty decent vehicle capacity.
I saw my first wild whale. It was most of a mile away – this is an unscaled crop from a telephoto shot. I leave identifying the species to you.
On arrival on the island, I had my lunch then drove through Charlottetown to Brackley Beach, which serves as the east coast analogue of Long Beach for this journey.
It is a pretty nice beach, with large sand dunes, soft sand and a good breeze. I took my shoes off and walked on the sand, and dipped my toes in the Atlantic.
And with that (cue music) the eastbound leg of my journey comes to an end.
As for my timelapse movie project, so far I’ve recorded 180,000 frames and the camera is still holding out.
Westbound
Time to turn around and head home.
I’m actually excited to be heading back. It’s a very similar feeling to when I started my trip, only instead of the flavor of visiting old haunts with an aftertaste of new discovery, this time it’s the other order with a final sweetness of homecoming. I’ll be going faster on the return trip, but I do have a couple of short layovers planned. Ottawa is the first.
Anyway, after leaving the beach, I took a short detour up the coast to Cavendish, home of Lucy Maud Montgomery of “Anne of Green Gables” fame. I’ve never read the books and I barely remember the TV series, but my mother is a fan so I thought I’d get her a souvenir. I got there just as they were closing, so I got in for free and got a bunch of photos of the place.
I thought this Green Gables house was a recreation of a fictional house from the book series, but talking to the tour guide, this turns out not to be the case. This is the real house that inspired the books; LMM lived a short ways from here but hung out in this house a lot. They’ve redecorated the interior slightly to make it match some details from the books, but otherwise it’s original.
Then drove back to Moncton for the night, passing over the Confederation Bridge on the way. It’s pretty nice. Only two lanes, but it is eight miles long. It’s like driving over the ocean, because that’s what it is.
We really should get one of these for Vancouver Island. Problem with this one is the $45 toll, which is subsidizing the ferry service down the coast – my boat ride was free; they get you on the way back, whichever way you go.
Today was a bit of a long day, but amazingly everything went according to my ridiculously ambitious plan.
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Halifax
2011/09/12
Short and easy drive to Halifax today. This is where my mother was born, though she didn’t live here for long.
Finding hotel rooms is easier now that kids are back in school; that first order of business was out of the way by 3pm.
Went downtown and had a quick look around. It’s a fairly small city, perhaps twice the size of Brandon, but it has a nicer downtown with some fairly old buildings:
There is, of course, a harbour with cruise ships and two large bridges. It kind of reminds me of a mini-Vancouver actually.
Went to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. It’s small but pretty interesting. They had temporary exhibits about the Titanic and about the early gay subculture amongst sailors (lending more depth to Smithers’s comment about women and seamen not mixing). But my favorite parts were the exhibit about the 1917 harbour explosion, and their collection of model ships, which I love. A few photos:
I then went to Peggy’s Cove, which is a small fishing village that contains Canada’s most-photographed lighthouse and is likely one of our most-photographed villages too. It’s every bit as picturesque as you might think, and I would say it’s a must-visit if you’re on the east coast. It’s about a 45-minute drive from Halifax, but I’m sure there are bus tours that go there.
It’s a very stark landscape – the rolling hills are all rock, carved by glaciers, and the land is littered with lichen-crusted boulders dropped by the glaciers. Ground cover is moss and low plants, with the occasional stand of small coniferous trees. It must get pretty bitter here in the winter and during storms.
Assorted Peggy’s Cove pictures:
Near the lighthouse there was a young woman busking with bagpipes to earn college money. I gave her some money because I like bagpipe music.
Self-portrait with landscape:
And today I’m feeling better about yesterday. I’m more confident now that skipping Newfoundland was a good decision, and also I talked to my parents about the location of the house near Harcourt, and we’re pretty sure I should have been able to see it given the distance I walked along the hydro lines; there’s nothing left of it now (it has been 35 years, after all).
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Obligatory Post Too
It has come to my attention that today is the tenth anniversary of when those unpleasant terra-ist people flew those planes into those buildings and killed a bunch of Americans.
Like every other blogger in the world, for some reason I think this calls for a comment.
My comment is: Get over it already.
I don’t disrespect the people who died in that unfortunate incident, nor to I belittle the heroic work done by rescue workers, cleanup crews and hosts around the world in the days immediately following.
But to focus on those 3,000 deaths is to disrespect and belittle some much more serious problems. A casual survey shows that motor vehicle accidents, Alzheimer’s disease, influenza and diabetes each kill more than ten times as many Americans every year, and cardiovascular diseases kill more than three hundred times as many Americans every year. And that’s just American figures, not worldwide. These are real tragedies, going on around us all the time. Somebody do something, please!
Don’t pretend that 9/11 was such a big deal because it was shocking. It’s no surprise that a lot of people hate America, and many of them have good reasons for doing so. It is a little surprising that they actually succeeded in crashing not one but two of those planes. It doesn’t seem like a hard problem to prevent that, and it doesn’t require any of the ineffectual and invasive crap that has been going on in airports over the last ten years.
The American response to the terrorist attack ten years ago was wrong, and I said so at the time. Instead of saying, “Fuck you, you don’t scare us”, y’all just scurried away and hid under your security theater and foreign military meddling covers. You let Bush hand the terrorists their victory on a silver platter, and that victory was that their terrorist act worked. You got all scared and voluntarily sacrificed your own freedoms – the very things that once made your country great – for a thin illusion of security. It would have been inspiring and admirable if instead you had deliberately and explicitly rejected any responses that would have curtailed the rights and freedoms of Americans.
Anyway, I’m tired and rambling on. Instead of digging myself in deeper, what these people said.
Change of Plan
Two, actually, regarding my cross-Canada road trip.
The first decision I actually made about two weeks ago, and just haven’t mentioned it online yet. After driving around on gravel roads in Manitoba for a bit, I discovered that the Slaywagon doesn’t handle very well on gravel roads. I think the suspension is set wrong. I basically lose almost all control when on washboards.
Given that Labrador’s only through road (just completed last year!) is all gravel and frequented by transport trucks, I decided I really didn’t want to spend three or four days driving under those conditions. So I’ve scapped the idea of driving through Labrador. Perhaps some other time.
The second decision was more difficult. My sabbatical and vacation time is growing shorter, and going to Newfoundland would definitely make my return home late. It’s a six-hour ferry ride each way to the island, and then a twelve-hour drive from the ferry terminal to St. John’s. So if I wanted to spend a full day in St. John’s, which I do, it would basically cost me an entire week.
At present I have just enough time to get home and do the things I want to do on the return trip. I could book another week off work to make the Newfoundland trip, but I find I’m already looking forward greatly to the trip home and the things I wanted to do in Newfoundland are not sufficiently enticing to justify an extra week of travel.
Halifax and PEI will be sufficiently east coast to complete the eastbound leg of my road trip.
I am disappointed at not making it an “island to island” trip (Vancouver Island to Newfoundland) and at missing going to the easternmost tip of civilized Canada, but I think I can live with it.
If I end up dwelling on it in later years, I can fly out to St. John’s, rent a car and do Newfoundland and Labrador in a combined trip. This is what I’m telling myself, anyway. Hopefully it will work.
