This photo was taken on the road as we headed for our first stop in Quebec last Saturday. It is notable for the fall colors starting to show up in the trees and for its location. This was taken in St-Louis-du-Ha!-Ha! I kid you not; that is how the name appeared on the road signs, exclamation points and all. Someone had a sense of humor.
We stayed in the much more ordinary L’Islet-sur-Mer, which wasn’t on the sea…
but was on the St. Lawrence River.
It was a pretty place with an interesting shoreline.
It had some very old houses. The plaque on this one says “Maison ancestrale 1681.
Just inland of the RV park was this small church. Built in 1835,
the back of the church was rounded.
Down the street was this much larger church. It was built (or at least founded) in 1768.
The back of this one was also rounded.
The builders seemed to like curves in this little village.
It made for some interesting places.
Now we are staying at Piopolis. This is a little municipal campground…
on Lac-Megantic.
The campsites are small but as long as no one uses the one right next to us Matey and I have a nice view from the tent.
It’s a short walk to town where there’s a tiny Magasin General.
There’s the required Catholic Church with bells that sound the hours.
The name of this gallery means “life hidden in stone”. I like that.
This fire tower, built in 1947, is not a lookout. They used it to hang the linen fire hoses out to dry.
There is also a pub,
and some pretty homes.
We walked down to the marina. The campground is just across the little bay.
We also explored a short side trail.
It just led out to a place where you might want to wet a line in the lake.
Another nicely kept campground in a nicely kept little town and a fine place for our last stop in Canada.
An unexpected benefit of République Provincial Park is that it abuts the New Brunswick Botanical Garden. Of course I had to go there. I waited until Friday hoping Bud would be well enough to attend, but although he’s on the mend he wasn’t up for this. So he and Matey stayed home.
I walked over, this beautiful campground made a nice prelude.
The day had turned nice and quite warm as I came to the impressive front entrance…
with its welcome garden.
As you leave the entrance building you are greeted by this huge water feature.
That’s not a lawn, it’s a lily pond!
Almost as soon as I started my tour some rain drops fell. I ducked under some trees and it really came down for a bit. It rained just long enough to make me run for a nearby building and get soaked.
The rain stopped, things dried out, and so did I.
There were a number of artists’ installations, this garden of time and space was one of them.
There was also topiary. Besides the woman at the gate there was this gardener that startled me by whistling and talking as I approached. Since he spoke French I didn’t catch what he said.
And there was this buffalo.
That was quite near the insect houses display. This little fellow did not read the sign on the kind of housing offered here.
Here’s another art installation. This one drew me in.
One of my favorite areas was the “flowering brook”.
It took the water from the ponds…
back to the Madawaska River.
It was a beautiful stream…
and invited wandering.
There were more ponds.
This topiary Canada goose was about to land in one.
That pond also had the shelter for the artist in residence along it. The shelter itself was a piece of art.
Around the perimeter was an arboretum. This was a young balsam fir, the provincial tree.
I would have suggested the larch, which obviously grow well here, but no one asked me.
And when did weeping varieties get this big?
Another of my favorites was the shade garden.
I revisited the main waterfall, this time climbing the artificial hill it fell down
Here’s where all the water starts its journey back to the river.
The last area I walked through was the perennial garden.
It was beautifully done and still had a lot of showiness this late in the season.
As I walked back towards the entrance building I passed by this guy, coming out of his shell to say hello.
When I left I detoured out to the auto entrance to get a good look at this horse. He was gorgeous and my favorite topiary.
Well, yeah, that’s the first one. I have COVID, and now it looks like Bud does, too. We had escaped so far, we have had many vaccinations and are never around people indoors. But last Wednesday I ended up doing the laundry in a very small and crowded laundromat and Sunday I was sick. Jamie says from the symptoms it sounds like the latest variant. We’ll get that vaccine once we’re back in the States.
Fortunately by Tuesday I was well enough to have the energy to move to our new campsite. See the trailer there in our “Full sun, no shade” site? I chose the “open” site for the satellite TV antenna; now we have Starlink which uses much less sky so the inaccuracy of the description didn’t matter.
Anyway, our troubles weren’t over because when I went to hook up our electrical service I noticed some discoloration on the side of our 30 to 50 amp adapter which always stays plugged into our surge protector.
When I unplugged it I found this. Woah, we can’t use that.
But there was a Canadian Tire in town and they had a replacement so we are now nicely hooked up and warm and dry.
We are still in New Brunswick, now almost to the border of Quebec, at de le Republique Provincial Park. I’m well enough to walk Matey and sit outside (bundled up today, it’s just over 60) and enjoy the view. I hope tomorrow or the next day Bud is well enough to join me touring this place. Today he’s just sleeping.
We are now at Mataquac Provincial Park in south central New Brunswick near Fredericton. There is a huge groomed campground, divided into parts by hedgerows and with some wooded areas.
We are out in the open in campground 1, and you can see that we are surrounded by camp roads and sites. There are 311 campsites in two campgrounds. Since it’s after Labor Day it’s almost empty. If all these sites were filled we wouldn’t like it here.
But now we have acres of public land…
right along the St. John River to share with just a few other campers.
Off season camping is one of the things we love about doing this full time.
After it rained on Sunday and the tide started to drop we finally took a walk out on the beach. I’d been wanting to walk out along the cliffs, but every morning while we were here there was a rising tide.
The tide is about 40 feet here now. This was only a couple of hours after high tide and already a lot of beach is exposed. You can see the bit of dry sand at the bottom of the photo, and the wet tide line.
When I walked the trail along the top of the cliffs I noticed this large culvert, but couldn’t really see where the water drained.
This is where it drains.
When the sign says these are actively eroding cliffs, this is what it’s referring to.
You don’t want to stand near these edges!
I found out later that this striking seam between the red rocks and the grey rocks is a fault line between the more recent (200 to 150 million years ago) Jurassic red rocks and the older (250 to 200 million years ago) Triassic grey basalt rocks.
But alas, this was as far as we could go as the water was up against the cliffs at this point.
On Monday the tides were even less cooperative, so we took a drive to the end of Phillips River Road nearby.
We walked a short way on the trail there…
to Economy Falls. You can just about see the falls from this vantage point. The water is flowing from the left, then is blocked by the rock I’m standing on and falls into the deep pool on the right.
There was a bridge…
that afforded a nice view of the stream…
but you still couldn’t see the brink of the falls.
I think the best view was below the falls, but we didn’t do the 186 steps to get down there (the dog, you know).
It was a nice walk and a pretty drive anyway.
Tuesday morning when we got up to leave the air was crisp and clear.
I had the great idea to take the stroller and walk the Estuary Trail this morning. Matey started out on the leash and he was happy to walk, which was a good thing, because this trail got very rooty, so even pushing the empty stroller was a chore.
We did find a few nice lookouts. The first afforded us a better look at the Five Islands, though you still couldn’t see them all.
Here we are further in and lower down, so you can see the commercial RV park at Sand Point more at eye level.
This is still further up the estuary. It was two hours before high tide so there was water up here.
That is not a functioning lighthouse, but it was picturesque.
After over a mile Matey seemed to be slowing so we put him in the stroller. Bud had to pull with the strap while I pushed and steered over the roots. At one point we crossed a little bridge down in a dip. Bud had to hold the stroller back while I carefully steered it down, then I was able to step down while Bud climbed up the other side. Then he pulled and I pushed up and over the other bank. I wanted a picture of that but the photo made it look almost flat. It wasn’t.
Matey began to look a bit stressed out from all the bouncing around. I don’t think standing with your feet braced is particularly restful. We let him out to walk on his own and I pulled the empty stroller while Bud pushed. The trail made a loop back to the beginning, or you could take a short branch up to the park road. We opted to take the exit and walk back the park road. As we neared the road I needed to put Matey back on the leash, so for the last bit of trail Matey was ahead, I followed with his leash in my left hand and the thick leash to the front of the stroller in my right. Bud followed pushing the stroller from behind. I wish someone had come by to take a picture of that!
After 1.8 miles of walking or being jostled, Matey was as glad to ride in the smooth stroller as we were to walk on the smooth road!
This afternoon we took a short ride down to Five Islands Lighthouse Park. We can see this lighthouse (not operational) from our campsite.
That’s the campground from the lighthouse.
Besides some nice views of the shoreline further west,
with its pretty, crumbling red cliffs,
I finally got to see all five islands.
Someone had painted and put up this nice sign identifying and giving a little information on each one. I liked that. The names are in the sky above the islands and hard to read, from the left there is Moose Island, Diamond Island, Long Island, Egg Island (it hardly shows in my photo) and Pinnacle Island, with Pinnacle Rock just to its right. Seeing the sign was worth the ride.
When I was planning our route way back last winter I tried to book us into Five Islands Provincial Park on our way to Newfoundland. But we needed a place in early June and the park didn’t open until June 15th. So we went to Glooscap Campground near Parrsboro instead. Still, the park sounded nice and when I realized we’d be circling back this way on our way out of Nova Scotia I booked us for five nights here. Yesterday we drove 162 miles to get the 71 miles from the red pin at Valleyview Provincial Park around the end of the Bay of Fundy to our campsite here, at the blue dot, at Five Islands Provincial Park.
I’m so glad we came! This is the view out our dinette window. We look across the top of the other serviced campsites, across an inlet of the the Bay of Fundy (all sand in this picture at low tide) to the shore beyond.
Not only that, we have a huge site and total privacy.
The blocking job we had to do to get the trailer level was totally worth it! (Those are rags between our boards and our yellow leveling blocks to keep the blocks from slipping as Bud pulled the trailer up on them; it worked.)
Matey and I took a short walk on a nice trail that curves from just above our campsite down along the cliff to the beach access parking lot.
It afforded some great views, too.
I think that’s one or two of the five islands. The fencing is because all these cliffs are eroding, so the edges are unstable. Again, it’s close to low tide, here.
I took a picture this morning about an hour before high tide; what was once a huge beach is now mostly water.
Then Bud and I took Matey and the stroller up Red Head Trail.
The trail got narrow and rough; going downhill I could manage, but going up Bud fastened a leash to the front to give me an assist. It worked well. I don’t have pictures of the rough stuff because I couldn’t spare a hand, but to look at it you’d never think a stroller would make it, but it wasn’t a problem.
We made it back to a couple of nice viewpoints.
This is where we turned back.
The telephoto lens gives you a better sense of the place.
Most of the time we could only glimpse the bay through the trees.
Matey had a nice walk in the shady parts going downhill on the way back. It’s a dog’s life, right?
There are beautiful views all around, but none better than right here at our campsite.
Yesterday we went to Fort Anne National Historic Site. The fort as restored is mostly based on the last fort the French built here, in the community they called Port-Royal.
The site is the first national historic site in Canada, operating as such since 1917. It also has the oldest building protected by Parks Canada, this powder magazine…
built in 1708.
The fort sits where the Annapolis River widens to become the Annapolis Basin, a very protected harbor on the Bay of Fundy. This is a rich area, its first human inhabitants, the Mi’kmaq, call it Nme’juaqnek-place of bountiful fish. There was a French fur trading post built in 1605, burned by an expedition from Jamestown in 1613.
And this was the place that gave Nova Scotia its name. A group of Scottish settlers came here in 1629. A treaty between France and Britain gave the area back to France in 1632; but though the Scots left, ultimately the name stuck and 70 people who lived here for just three years gave us Nova Scotia, Latin for New Scotland.
Then in 1636 a group of French came back. They were welcomed by the Mi’kmaq who helped them learn to live on this land. It became the center of the French colony of Acadie. The Acadians learned to dyke the river and convert the land from marshes to fertile fields. They didn’t interfere with the Mi’kmaq’s seasonal fishing and the groups lived as friends and allies. The fort changed hands seven times over the next years. The Acadians kept farming and tried to stay neutral. The Mi’kmaq just tried to keep to their traditional way of life; no matter who claimed the land belonged to them, the Mi’kmaq knew they belonged to the land.
In 1710 Port Royal fell to the British for the last time. The fort was renamed Fort Anne and the town became Annapolis Royal in honor of Queen Anne. The officer quarters you see here, now a museum, is the only building remaining from the British fort.
But not the only structure. This is the Queens Wharf.
It’s been partially reconstructed and although it no longer extends far enough to be useful to boats it is a great place to take in the view, complete with Canadian National Parks red Adirondack chairs. Bud and Matey waited for me there while I toured the museum.
The whole site is now a lovely place to be.
Today after a brief stop at a nearby lighthouse…
we took a walk on the nicest trail we’ve been on since leaving Newfoundland. Signage told us the trail, part of the Delaps Cove Wilderness Trail is on land that was a settlement of “Black Indians”, descendants of Mi’kmaq and Black Loyalists who came north after the Revolutionary War. Their name for the place is Medbankeajetc (Little Red Bank).
When the trail reached the coast of the Bay of Fundy we found this moving memorial.
I signed the guestbook enclosed in the very well made stand.
This was a very rocky shore.
We thought these rocks looked volcanic.
Whatever the rocks, it was beautiful.
There was a brook that made a little falls…
with places to view it…
from both sides.
I loved the poem on this dedication for Meier Point.
The view was nice, too.
From there the trail followed Bohaker Brook and looped back to the parking lot.
Leaving the trail we drove across the peninsula to the Annapolis River.
We went to the Melanson Settlement National Historic Site, just outside of today’s Port Royal, which turned out to be this open field with a lot of signage.
From the picture on this sign you could see that there had been a lot of activity here. This was an Acadian homestead where six families lived. It was abandoned in 1755 when the Acadians were forcibly deported. Because of its location this site was never disturbed since the British razed it, so it is a great archaeological find.
Now we are snug in our trailer for a very foggy, drippy afternoon.
Sunday we came to another Nova Scotia Provincial Park. This one has only 30 campsites in total and only 12 serviced sites. Here we are in site number seven and it is very private.
There is a big area off to the side for my screen tent…
and Matey and I are enjoying the view.
Our visit to Ellenwood Lake was ruined when Matey was attacked by an unspayed female Boxer. She broke her flimsy lead and charged out and tackled him as we were walking by. Matey never saw her until she was on him. The person who brought her to the park (he said he wasn’t the owner) grabbed her and Matey wasn’t seriously hurt, but it was scary and enough to make me glad to leave.
So I am very glad to be at the smaller and appropriately named Valleyview Provincial Park. This is looking out on the Annapolis Valley. This lookout is just on the other side of our small camping loop.
Earlier this morning there was a very different view.
We are once again near the shore of the Bay of Fundy, this time on the southeast side. This morning we drove northeast to play disc golf. While there we drove up to a small provincial park on the east side of Cape Split.
Here we were directly across the bay from Glooscap, where we had stayed in early June.
It was low tide and there were the same huge beaches.
We came down these steps…
and had a look around.
Then we drove up to the top of the ridge that runs along the center of the cape.
We took the road as far as it went out the cape. From there Split Rock Trail takes you on a nine mile loop to the end of the cape.
We just stopped so I could get some pictures. First looking back at the mainland shore…
and then looking out towards the end of the cape.
That’s Scots Bay, the village on Scots Bay.
This is a boat launch, complete with boats waiting for high tide. They are tied to a floating dock. That post on the end secures the dock, notice how tall it is.
Yes, we are glad to be in our small campground and back near the fascinating Bay of Fundy.
I’ve been so pleased with taking Matey in the stroller that we decided to do it again yesterday and take a 2.5 mile walking tour of Yarmouth. We started at the waterfront, and here we let Matey walk on his own.
This building was the headquarters of the Killam Brothers shipping business for 203 years. Now it’s a museum. After the Killam Brothers building the tour was supposed to go up along Main Street, but instead of looking at the old commercial buildings we decided to continue along the waterfront.
There is a fleet of pretty big boats there.
We walked as far as the ferry dock. The ferry here goes to Portland, Maine. It might be something to look into for a future trip.
Most of the rest of the tour was big, beautiful old houses. The guide map was less than precise and between the stroller and taking pictures I had a hard time following the map. The map was on one side of the brochure and the descriptions on the other. Bud couldn’t help with the map because he didn’t have his glasses. So some of these I know are the houses in the brochure and some are just pretty houses. This is Murray Manor, built in 1845 and is the regency gothic style.
This was the newspaper publishers house, a colonial revival house built in 1897.
Bud and I loved this old tree in the yard. Apparently it lost its main trunk long ago, but it’s still growing.
And this is my favorite; it was one of two identical houses built in 1877 by Robert Eakins as gifts for his son and daughter. They were built in the gothic revival style. Unfortunately the twin to this house burned down in 1992.
This beauty was for a time the Catholic bishop’s residence. It is incredibly intricate.
My favorite detail was this owl above a stairway window.
My vote for best paint job goes to this beauty.
This Italianate house has a nice paint job also.
And I love the glass tower and the little portholes in the tower roof on this one; though the house was built in 1862 and the tower added in 1891. To me it doesn’t go with the house, but that is part of its charm.
It was nice to walk through these pretty streets…
and see a bit of charming old Yarmouth. And yes, those are gravestones in the park. Apparently it was decided in 1865 that this site was too small for the graveyard. It became a park, but the graves remain. There are also graves beneath some of the nearby streets. I guess people weren’t as careful about old cemeteries then.
On the Roam Again 