Good Morning Fredericton! Good Night Port Credit!

Sadly our journey has come to an end. Before I get to the end, let's start where we left off. I believe I was a happy lady enjoying room service in Halifax. Dan was out enjoying beer and other testosterone fueled activities. The Colonel was relaxing park-side after many hard days of driving and temper tantrums.


(Ahhhh room service)

Sunday Dan and I walked down to the harbourfront to take in some of BuskerFest. It just occurred to me that there were a lot of "fests" in Halifax over the weekend... I digress. So yes, buskers, cotton candy, water, lunch on the patio, all very lovely. Dan, Ian, Curtis and Paul then went on to smoke cigars in their favourite little cigar lounge while I ventured out in search of ice cream and souveniers. Neither are lacking in Halifax, that is for sure! Anything you need shaped like a lobster, they've got it.


(Strong buskers!)


(The guys in the cigar lounge)


(Things shaped like lobsters)

That night we went for sushi for dinner which was delicious. I highly recommend deluxe lobster rolls if you ever see them! Dan and the boys then ventured out for another night of "fest"ing. So Monday morning, Dan was a bit.... slow.... and we didn't end up leaving until quite a bit later than we had intended to. Hm. Well at least we're on vacation and have nowhere to rush to! We set off about 1:00 and headed west. We made a small diversion to take another scenic route (Highway 2 in Nova Scotia along the Bay of Fundy, highly highly recommend it!), so we could stop at "That Dutchman's Farm" to pick up Jan's favourite cheese: Dragon's Breath. http://www.denhoek.ca/ I picked up what I think is a 10 lb wheel of garlic gouda that is to die for, along with the prerequisite orders for smelly cheese. The farm itself was pretty outstanding! They had at least 4 peacocks that I could see, cows, sheep, cats... I was in heaven! They also have a little dutch restaurant, but unfortunately we got there a bit late and missed out on lunch. It was a really fun little place though, I'm looking forward to going back again one day and hiking their trails!


(That Dutchman's Farm view over Bay of Fundy)





Further down the road we stopped at a little town bazaar in an old school house. Dan and I each bought hand knit toques (and a pair of matching mittens for me!) for coming home to this chilly Toronto weather ;) Further yet down the road, we were starving and stopped in Five Islands for dinner at a place called Mo's. It's this very cool hostel/internet cafe/restaurant/art gallery that you would never expect to find in a place that doesn't even have a stop sign. (http://www.backpackers.ca/listings.php?cityid=Five%20Islands) I had a bowl of their incredible homemade seafood chowder and Dan and I split one of their bbq chicken pizzas. The pizza was done in a woodburning oven and we agreed it was probably one of the best meals we had on our trip! What a happy surprise!

Round about Fredericton it started to rain. And by rain I mean unleash the ocean vertically while negotiating construction zones. You know how to piss off the Colonel? Tell him it's the end of vacation, so now it's time to drive 20+ hours in the pouring rain and that when you get home, you don't REALLY know what's going to happen to him. The Colonel's revenge? No more windshield wipers. Nope. Just no more. They were working, now they are not. Take THAT! We very slowly crept our way off the highway and into a Home Depot parking lot where we figured we at the very least would have a bathroom that opened at 6am. Dan (still dealing with the ramifications of last night's "fest") fell asleep fairly quickly while I stayed up writing in our travel journel and reading a bit. About an hour later the rain stopped, but sometimes it's best just to listen to the signs and stay put.

Early the next morning we hit the road again with clear sunny skies. We discovered there was a Starbucks just down the street so we grabbed our first chai lattes in a month and hit the road yet again! *If I may interject a little note here, I would like to thank my iPhone and Apple again for this wonderous invention. Not only can my iPhone show me on a map where the heck I am in the middle of seemingly nowhere, it can also tell me where there's a Starbucks within 200km. This amazing little piece of technology saved my butt numerous times with maps, and also kept me connected with the world of Facebook, which we all know is of number one priority ;) *

We drove and drove and drove and then we both thought "man it's getting loud in here", and I thought "There must be a motorcycle passing us..." and then it sounded like we got a flat! Crap!!! Of course we HAVE a spare, but what we DON'T have is a jack. Duh! Well for once fate worked our way and it wasn't a flat, it was our exhaust! It split!!! No WONDER it was getting loud! So Dan played McGyver and cut open a Pepsi can and threw it over the split pipe, holding it in place with a big clamp. We got to Woodstock and visited Crappy Tire where we bought some high heat tape to seal it all shut. And then we read the directions: Apply to cold pipe. Oh. So we drove 17 hours with what sounded like a fleet of Harley Davidson's sitting between us.

When you drive in a scenario like that you get a glimpse of your future. Very apropos considering our upcoming nuptials. Most of our conversations went like this:
Dan: "werlskjfosdihfioeharean?"
Me: "WHAT?????"
Dan: "I SAID WHAT TIME IS IT????"
Me: "10:07!!!!"

Also common was me seeing Dan's lips moving, then me deciding my throat was too sore from screaming "WHAT????" at him, so I'd just nod and smile and go back to watching the traffic. It's like a vision of being 80 together isn't it?

We got into Port Credit about 1:30am. The cats were very happy to see us. We were very happy to get out of the Colonel (no offense Colonel). We were very happy to see our big king size bed. That was one heck of a drive!!!

Tomorrow I will post one last post up here with a few more photos and notes of things I wanted to share. I'm just too tired now to cover them off! Thanks again for all your support, both moral and technical (Tom, Barry, Rob), over the past few months. See you at the wedding!!!!

xoxo

Hello Halifax!

I am a happy woman today. Dan fixed the Colonel YET AGAIN and saved our trip YET AGAIN! He deserves a medal. And a big kiss. So we got on the road this morning and started heading down the scenic route to Halifax. For those of you who ever have to make this drive, skip the TransCanada and take highway 7. It's a gorgeous drive through tons of little towns along the coast. We got stuck for an hour in Sheet Harbour because the ONE road going through (hwy 7) was being closed down for a parade. So the traffic officer advised us to take the loop road, park, and watch the parade and then we could be on our way again. Have you ever seen a parade in a town that doesn't even have traffic lights?! It was pretty great. There were a lot of classic cars, a few cars from the local Corvette club, floats from the Dollar Store (3 girls in denim skirts on the back of their dad's pick-up), the local grocery store, and Smokey the Bear who had a taxidermy bear behind him. There must be a local taxidermist because there were A LOT of dead stuffed animals in the parade. Slightly disturbing. Our favourite float however, was the 2 kids towed behind dad's car on a flat trailer wearing diapers with a sign that said "We cry when we don't get what we want" and dancing to oldies music. No explanation and slightly disturbing but we laughed until we cried. Dan also thoroughly enjoyed the one Mountie in the parade and named him Captain Canada.


(Man on an Artic Cat with taxidermy animals. Right.)


(The local nursery gave away flowers to the ladies. So sweet!)


(Strange float of kids in diapers with fake bums. I'm not sure an explanation would even help here.)


(Captain Canada)

The rest of our drive wasn't nearly as eventful. We stopped at a local bakery just outside of Halifax for coffee and a cookie. Very often we get people who stop and talk to us reminiscing about "the old days" and telling us how much they love our RV. It's pretty cute, especially in small towns, we become quite a spectacle! We got into Halifax, found some free parking (Dan is the master of parallel parking, he somehow got an 18' RV into a spot in downtown Halifax!!) and checked into our hotel. Dan's mom very graciously has booked us into the beautiful Lord Nelson as an engagement gift. She must have known I was dying for a hot shower and a glass of wine!!! Driving in an RV is fun, but you start to get a little wacky after a while. Plus it's nice to NOT be sharing your shower and toilet with the other 80 people on the campsite.

Our friends Ian, Caroline, Curtis, and Mary Kelly are in Halifax right now as well. Ian and Caroline moved to the UAE a while back so it's a rare treat to get to see them! We visited with them and they've all gone off to BeerFest somewhere downtown. I opted to stay in with room service and a good book since I'm not a big drinker. I figure with all the money we've saved cooking over campsites and spending our first week sleeping in various parking lots, I can splurge on a dinner for myself! I am a happy happy woman!!!! I'm sure Dan will stumble in a happy happy man at some wee hour of the night ;)


(Literally the first bed Dan and I will be sharing since we got engaged! LOL! We sleep separately in the RV, he's too big to fit us both into one place!)


(The Colonel in front of the Lord Nelson. I think we brought their room rate down by $50 a night just by parking there for 10 minutes.)

Next stop, Halifax

It's been a while I know I know! The internet is pretty unreliable in Newfoundland to say the least. An update of what we've been up to. We went to L'Anse-Au-Meadows on Wednesday and bumped into our Viking friend Bonnie (the Viking tow truck driver's wife). She told us about the construction of the old viking homes that were built on this site, 2' of peat/sod, 2' of gravel, and then 2' of peat again! She dressed us up in traditional Viking garb and took a few photos with us as well! It was a really fun morning.


(L'Anse-Au-Meadows site)


(Soon-to-be Battle Axe)


(Us with Bonnie, our wonderful new friend!)

We spotted an iceberg off the coast of L'Anse-Au-Meadows, and decided to take a boat tour. The lady in the gift shop's husband runs one as luck would have it! It's a small world in Newfoundland! So Mavis's husband Tobias took Dan and I out on his boat. We had a personal tour! He took us all the way to another iceberg we spotted when we got out there, and we even saw a few dolphins (they call them squiddowns in Newfoundland) along the way. We circled around the iceberg for a few minutes and then Tobias caught a piece that had fallen off and broke it up so we could chew on some iceberg ice on our way back to shore. Pretty incredible! The ice is SO clear it's like glass. That's the part that looks blue, and then other parts of the ice have all these tiny bubbles in them, which is what makes it look white. When pieces fall off into the water, you can hear all the bubbles bursting as it melts and it sounds like it's sizzling in the water. Talk about once in a lifetime!!


(A chunk of iceberg. You can see the clear and the bubble parts)





Dan and I headed south after our iceberg experience. We ended up driving a bit later than we wanted to that night and had a nerve racking drive through the upper end of Gros Morne with my face pressed against the front windshield looking for those nocturnal moose! Thankfully we didn't see any and got to the KOA campsite safe and sound. EARLY the next morning we set out again to meet our ferry. The Colonel had other plans though. We had to stop quite a few times to clear out our fuel lines (thanks again gas tank people for screwing up our tank!), and Dan even changed the fuel pump road side thinking it would help. We literally crawled onto the ferry, after begging customer service to switch us to a later one, and were the last ones on!!! We just BARELY made it by the skin of our teeth!!!


(A neat thing in Newfoundland is that people dry their wood on the side of the road, some times in teepee sort of shapes, some times just in piles. We're not sure how they tell them apart because it's not really on any one's property, just piled along the side of the highway.)


(Also, people randomly pick spots along the highway and plant gardens! So neat!)


(Dan chowing down on a mammoth Viking burger!)


(I went for local snow crab)

Today we made it as far as Antigonish, Nova Scotia. We had plans of making it to Halifax today, not a huge feat, but again, the Colonel had other plans. Thanks AGAIN fuel tank people. We're in a motel tonight getting a rest and a chance to catch up with email, and in the morning we'll fix the Colonel back up and hopefully get back on the road again. Sigh. Oh Colonel.

St Anthony, the patron saint of lost things (including drive shafts)

Hello from St Anthony, Newfoundland!

So much has happened, so let's back track a little before I get to our adventures in St Anthony. After our hike up The Lookout, the next day Dan and I hiked the Tablelands. This is a really unique area of the world, where essentially 2 plates pushed up against each other and literally the inside of the earth popped to the outside! There are only a few places in the world that you can see this type of rock, it's pretty spectacular! All the rocks are a rusty yellow colour on the outside, but if you were to slice them open they're black on the inside almost like granite. It was a pretty short hike through the Tablelands to a small river bed. Dan decided he wanted to hike up to the top of the Tablelands Mountains so I went back to the RV to wait. He's only getting one mountain hike out of me! He made it up but got lost in a cloud and ended up coming out a lot further down the road than he had intended, so he came back a bit later than he intended, but he came down thankfully! He said all the rocks on the top of the mountain were very square, like if you built an egg out of Lego, because they've never really encountered water to round them down.





Unfortunately, when we got back to our campsite at the KOA we discovered someone had stolen our little orange BBQ!!!! How disappointing!!! The nice people at KOA gave us a new little one for free from their shop, but it's not nearly as good as what we had. Thankfully the "camping" aspect of our trip is nearly over really, so we can survive the last leg of our journey making due with the new bbq we were given.

Sunday we went up to Western Brook Pond and took a boat tour through the fjords of Gros Morne. Talk about gorgeous! It was like touring through Jurassic park it's so untouched and lush. There were tons of waterfalls, and we even saw a bald eagle. The pond and fjords were carved out by ancient glaciers and the pond used to connect with the ocean, but over the years the land has reflexed after the weight of the glaciers left, and is now cut off from the ocean. They've found whale bones in the pond, so that's how they know it used to be connected. A little fact we learned while on our boat tour is that moose are not native to Newfoundland. The first two were introduced in the early 1900s and the attempt failed, so in 1911 they introduced 4 more. Now there are over 100 000!!! That's 6 moose/square kilometre!











Yesterday we left Gros Morne (boo!) and headed up the coast towards Lans-Aux-Meadows, the viking settlements. We stopped along the way to see an iceberg that was floating just off the coast, very cool! A bit closer to St Anthony, we saw two bull moose fighting on the side of the highway. We stopped in case the loser turned tail and ran out onto the road (a valid concern around here!). When the moose were finished, we moved along, but our sudden acceleration caused our drive shaft to literally snap right off!!! The drive shaft is essentially what makes your wheels turn, you can't do anything without it. Crap. So I flagged down a kind gentleman who took our CAA information and called for us once he was within cellphone reception again. An hour or so later a pick-up truck with flashing lights pulls up and two mechanics hop out, Wayne and Dan. They hook up (and by hook up I mean tie our two vehicles together with a rope) the Colonel to their truck and off we go, with Wayne driving the Colonel and Dan and I as passengers with him. We soon discover that Wayne worked at Lans-Aux-Meadows as a viking actor for many years, met his wife there (a fellow actor), and even had a viking wedding nearby! They have 2 kids now, his wife still works as a viking actor, and he still does viking dinner theatre and the odd day dressed as a viking for various cruiseship arrivals. Apparently being a viking actor is somewhat unpredictable, so he's also working as a shop assistant at the mechanic's shop across the street from his house. We got towed by a viking. When we got to St Anthony and got the Colonel parked, he took us over to his house and gave Dan a clean dry pair of socks, and showed us his viking wedding photos. After dinner at our hotel last night we went back over to Wayne's house and met his family and a few of his friends. We had a bonfire and Wayne set off some fireworks. His family actually reminds me of my own a little. A couple of their friends we met are from Nova Scotia, they came over for dinner and haven't left town since. That was three years ago!! It was a really great night with a bunch of wonderful warm people. His youngest daughter Emily latched onto me like a barnacle and is quite a little actor herself.


(The Newfie tow)


(That would be our drive shaft)


(The moose fighting that made us stop)


(Iceberg!!!)

Today we're probably going to go whale watching if the weather cooperates. There are apparently tons of whales, seals, dolphins and icebergs off the coast here. The restaurant downstairs in our hotel is excellent, so I think we'll be well taken care of here!

Dan wanted me to tell you to click on the ads at the side of our blog. We get a few cents every time someone clicks on it, so maybe we can offset the cost of our new drive shaft with a few more clicks ;)

The Lookout

Yesterday I proved how much I love Dan. I hiked up a mountain. I hate to sweat. I hate exercise. I hiked up a mountain and it was HOT and humid and I did not enjoy that part. Dan enjoyed all of it.


(This is the "Veronica does not like to sweat" face.)

HOWEVER, I did enjoy the scenery and watching the different types of plants and trees change as we hiked up the trail. There was everything from little maples, to pine trees, to a big meadow full of pitcher plants up at the top. The view from the top was stupendous, a vista stretching from the Tablelands, all the way over to the Gulf of St Lawrence. It was gorgeous!!! Well worth the hot sweaty exertion on the way up ;) We stayed at the top for a while chatting with a couple who had grown up here but now live in Winnipeg, and a local amateur photographer who gave us some trips on other trails to try out. We've met so many nice people along our journey, it's nice to reflect back on them all and have such great memories of people who are just a few minutes of our lives, but part of a time I'm sure we'll never forget.


(A panoramic of the view from the top)


(We made it!!!)



On our way back down, we almost literally bumped into a moose! We heard a crashing in the bush near us, and not 10 feet away was a young bull moose! CRAZY!!!




(Filling up our water jug with fresh mountain spring water. Yum!!!)