On the road again

After one last eggs-and-bastorma breakfast, we said good-bye to George and Valleyfield. Before hitting the highway, we first made a stop at the farmer's market in Coteau-du-Lac, where we bought freshly-baked bread, cheese, and jellies for lunch. Within minutes the highway lead us into Ontario. The weather was warm (Artemis brought out her shorts). After two days of rest, we decided to get in a good number of kilometers, which wasn't hard to do on the mostly 4-lane highways. With just two stops, we made the 450 km to Oshawa.

Salaberry-de-Valleyfield III

One more day in Valleyfield before we are heading to Ontario and Niagara Falls. Platon has been doing some small stuff to the van before we leave, and Artemis has been scouring the internet for Real Estate in this area. She has taken a real liking to Valleyfield. And listen to this Vancouverites: a waterfront property with hot-tub and your own boat dock for a measely $249,000. An esplanade waterfront home with in-ground swimming pool and walking distance from the local marina for only $189,000. In Vancouver you would be lucky to get a one-bedroom condo for that price. Plenty of nice homes for under $200.000, but if you are willing to fork over $429.000, you can have a grand estate with all the bells and whistles, on a double waterfront lot. Of course there is the problem of a job first, and also it is very nice weather here now, but what about winter? Artemis hates the cold! She`ll have to buy woollen undies and a sealskin parka. On our last evening in Quebec, we went to the Win Wah Chinese buffet in Dorion (apparently a favourite amongst Calogeros brothers). The red sky on the drive home promises another nice day tomorrow. We were home just in time to see the third period of the Pittsburg - Detroit Stanley Cup final.

Salaberry-de-Valleyfield II

Today was a day for catching-up: catching up on laundry, family news, worldnews (we had totally forgotten about the world economy and the swine-flu), and we also found out that the Stanley-cup final is tomorrow evening, and that the Canucks are not in it. Over the past few weeks, we have asked many people if they knew how the Canucks were doing. Nobody really knew (who cares about those westerners anyway). Artemis went shopping (what else) and we just hung around the house, relaxed, talked and watched TV (something we haven`t done for weeks and we didn`t miss it at all). I think the dogs were also glad to be off `shaky ground`after our almost 700km drive yesterday. At lunch, George who is a pretty good cook, made a mean seafood linguini and in return I showed him how to make Lahano-dolmades (the Greek version of cabbage rollls with egg-lemon sauce). The full size kitchen is quite a change from the small pantry in the van. At 3 in the pm George, Platon and Artemis went for a supposingly short shopping-trip but didn`t come back home till 8.20pm, loaded with bags full of all kinds of mostly Lebanese goodies. For those of you that don`t know, Artemis was born and spent the first 4.5 years of her life in Lebanon, and still a lot of her favorite foods are Lebanese. It seems on their way to the store they stopped at the National Historic Site at Coteaux-du-Lac where there had been a military post in the early 1800`s.

Rain, rain, go away.

We drove from New Brunswick into La Belle Province under heavy clouds and light rain. If it had to rain on our trip, this was the best day for it. All we had planned was a 500 km drive North to Quebec. So far we have been lucky with the weather, when it really counted. Sure we had snow, wind, fog and cold days, but overall it has been partly cloudy and mostly sunny. Now that we are back again on divided highways (there were very few of those in the Maritimes), it seems that the government employees that maintain the reststops, finally came out of hibernation, because the reststops are finally open. The roadworkers woke up too, because every few kilometers there is detour of some kind because of roadworks. For lunch, now that we are back in Quebec, we had to stop for poutine of course. The portions were so big that even the dogs got their share. By the afternoon the drizzle had turned into steady rain, so we decided to keep on driving. By early evening it finally stopped raining and by rushhour (that was a big mistake), we found ourselves in a mostly sunny Montreal. We made it to Platon`s brother George in Valleyfield by 7.30 pm.

Fredericton and Grand Falls

We spent the night in the tiny woollen mill town of Harvey. As you can see from the picture, the Sears branch there was just as tiny.







After consulting our tourbook, we decided to pay a visit to Fredericton. Fredericton is an old french garrison town on the St. Johns river with lots of historical buildings. Together with the dogs we made a self-guiding walking tour around the old part of town. The military building were really old, 17th century, and there was a beautiful gothic cathedral, apparently the first cathedral built in North America. On our afternoon drive North, thanks to a highway sign, we found a real gem at Grand Falls, where over a kilometer or so, the St. Johns river squeezes through a narrow gorge, creating dozens of rapids and waterfalls. We set up camp in Northern New Brunswick at St. Leonard, along the banks of the Grande Riviere. As we are used to by now, we only had to share the entire campsite with one other couple. Across the water was the U.S. state of Maine. We did not cross the US-Canadian border at any time during our trip because we wanted it to be truly Canadian, so we left our pasports home.

Bay of Fundy National Park

After breakfast, we drove to Fundy National Park. We stopped at several lookouts to take pictures and hiked to Point Wolfe, past a rebuilt old covered bridge. We lunched at the water`s edge of the Bay of Fundy. After exiting the park, we drove towards St. John, past St. Andrews and then turned Northwards.

High Tide, Low Tide

We got up early today to find out what time the tidal bore from the Bay of Fundy would come rushing into the narrow channel at Truro. Since we had a few hours left before that event we decided to update the blog at a local coffee shop. Watching the tide come in was very interesting. It was like a dyke suddenly gave way and it went from low tide to high tide in a matter of minutes as a 2m-high wall of water rushed right into the narrowing funnel that was mostly dry a little while earlier (the picture doesn`t do it justice). After lunch we crossed into New Brunswick and we drove along the Bay of Fundy to Cape Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park. We were lucky it was low tide by this time so Artemis and Platon climbed down to the ocean floor and wandered around between the exposed "flower pots". Another "must-see" we can scratch off our to-do list!