lighthouse – Meanderings & Mind Munchies

Yarmouth

I’m combining everything we did while in Yarmouth because, frankly, we didn’t do much.

First, some final thoughts about Nova Scotia before we head back to the States tomorrow. Much of this stuff applies to New Brunswick, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island, too.

The hiking opportunities are limited and not particularly interesting.
Although there are rail trails that do permit biking, the trail surfaces tend to be too soft and gravelly for e-bikes.
The churches here are very pretty, with lovely trim, windows, and tall steeples. I would have loved to have stopped and taken more photos of them, but Greg was driving. 😆
There are plenty of places for kayaking, but we rarely saw any scenery that we would have enjoyed viewing from the water.
The absolute best way to eat lobster is steamed with melted butter. None of this lobster roll or creamed lobster stuff! Yuck.
The weather in Nova Scotia in August is gorgeous, but be prepared for lots of foggy mornings in Yarmouth. And as one park employee told us, if you don’t like the weather, just hang around for another 10 minutes, because it’s sure to change!
Don’t expect to see many pretty lighthouses, and don’t expect to find them easily.
The best whale watching tours take off from Brier Island or Long Island.

Lighthouse day

As I said, we didn’t do much while we were here, but one day we decided to drive around and see how many lighthouses we could find. We started with the Cape Forchu Lighthouse.

Note the blue sky in the first couple of photos.

This lighthouse is called an apple core lighthouse because of its shape.

And then the fog rolled in…

Next, we headed to Bug Light, which is way out on Bunker’s Island in the Yarmouth Harbor.

After that thrilling sight, we headed to Pubnico Lighthouse. I don’t know how, but Greg managed to make this lighthouse look significantly more impressive than it deserved.

This is Greg’s photo. It is a close-up view because the beach is unattractive, and off to the right are giant wooden platforms holding hundreds of lobster traps with dead crabs in them.

Our final lighthouse of the day was the Abbott’s Harbour Lighthouse. To get to it, we discovered, you have to walk through an Acadian living history settlement.

We arrived just after it had closed, which is a shame because it looked like it would have been interesting.

Anyway, one of the employees told us that we were welcome to walk through the property to see the lighthouse.

I was disappointed because it was impossible to see the water from the lighthouse, and there was no way to get a photo of the lighthouse from the water.

I did get these photos from the water’s edge, though.

Greg was stung by a bee while we were there, so we decided to use that as an excuse to go out to dinner on the way back to the camper. We decided on Rudder’s Seafood and Brewery because it named two of our favorite things: seafood and beer!

As we were leaving the restaurant, the fog once again rolled in.

And just so you know what I mean about pretty churches, here is a photo I took of St. John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg.

And this is how we spent much of our time while in Yarmouth. 👇

Bye, Bye, Nova Scotia!

The Cliffs of Fundy Geopark

At last! Beautiful weather. Today we drove along the Cliffs of Fundy, which was on the opposite side of the water from Burntcoat Head. It was an all-day affair, but we had a great time.

Thomas Cove

Greg wanted to hike one of the trails at Thomas Cove. This turned out to be harder than we had expected. Either the trail dumped us out on a sandy beach with no idea which way we were supposed to go, or the trail was virtually invisible. All the warnings about poisonous plants didn’t help.

This is not the kind of trail I am used to hiking.

The views were beautiful, though.

Five Islands Provincial Park

After a quick stop at the Welcome Center and a quick tour of the World War II tower, we headed to Five Islands Provincial Park.

If you zoom in, you can see tiny people walking in the distance. That’s how much of the seafloor was exposed.

Do you see that little rock separated from the others? That is called Old Wife, and it was our destination.

Most of the beaches in Canada seem to be filled with small rocks. That was the case with Five Islands Provincial Park as well, but as the tide withdrew, red sand and large slabs of limestone were exposed.

Where we could, we walked along the sand and limestone slabs.

These limestone slabs made walking fairly easy. Thousands of little snails clung to their crevices.

Getting to Old Wife was not as easy as we had been led to believe by the employee at the visitor center.

Between the rocks, the seaweed, and the ebbing tide, we had quite a challenge!

The trek was worth it, though. After we climbed over more rocks and seaweed, we were treated to the view below. According to the employee at the visitor center, these rocks were once part of Pangea. The other half of them is in Morocco.

Greg, standing beside Old Wife with Moose Island in the background.

Five Islands Lighthouse Park

Next up on our drive along the Cliffs of Fundy Geopark was Five Islands Lighthouse Park.

In the photo above, you can see a few of the five islands.

The Fundy Geological Museum

Our next stop was the Fundy Geological Museum, where we got to view the different types of rock that tell the story of Nova Scotia’s geological history.

On the way out of town, I took the photo below. I thought it was pretty, and it reminded me of the beach.

Ottawa House Museum

Next, we stopped by Ottawa House Museum, mostly just to get a picture and see what it looked like. We didn’t go in. By this time, it was getting late, and we still had to drive over an hour back to the campground.

The view of Partridge Island from the lawn of Ottawa House.

One of the many lighthouses along The Cliffs of Fundy is not far from Ottawa House Museum, so we decided to make a quick stop there. We should have known better. Canada is exceptionally good at hiding its lighthouses.

After driving down a gravel road for several kilometers and reaching a dead end, then turning around and driving all the way back again, we finally found the road that should take us to the lighthouse. Unfortunately, the road was little more than a rarely-used overgrown track. I’m not sure our truck could have navigated it. Needless to say, we didn’t attempt it.

On the way back to the campground, we were treated to this pretty view of Partridge Island.

Hidden Falls

We made one final stop before calling it a day. When we pulled in to the tiny parking lot for Hidden Falls, we were the only ones there.

After a short 15-minute hike, we arrived at the falls. The pictures really don’t do it justice, although I find that true of falls in general.

All in all, it was a great day. We recorded 14,000 steps, and by the end of the day, I felt every one of them.

Prince Edward Island

After our stay in Moncton, New Brunswick, we headed to Prince Edward Island. It’s a good thing Greg didn’t plan for more than 2 days on PEI. I think we would have been bored.

Crossing Confederation Bridge from New Brunswick

After arriving and setting up our camp, we headed to Prince Edward Island National Park to see whether we would like to go biking there the next day. Ultimately, we decided that the trail was too narrow and there weren’t enough interesting things to see. It ran right along the shoreline. There were lots of beaches, but not much else.

Then we went into Charlottetown for dinner. Our kayak tour guide from Moncton had recommended a specific restaurant called Merchantman that we wanted to try. We drove around for a while, trying to find a parking space (this should have been our first clue about things to come) before we were finally successful. Luckily, dinner was good. I had my second seafood chowder of our Canadian trip.

The next day Greg had scheduled an e-bike tour of Charlottetown. Unfortunately, it was a rainy day, so we rescheduled the tour for the following day. Instead, we snuggled up in our RV and relaxed.

The next day we headed off for our e-bike tour under sunny skies, but man, was it windy! Once again, we could not find parking. Greg finally pulled over and called the e-bike tour company to ask if they had any recommendations. They directed us to a parking lot, which turned out to be full. The other parking lot that they directed us to turned out to be under construction. At that point, we gave up and told them we were skipping the tour.

We decided to check out some of the lighthouses on Prince Edward Island next. After following the directions to our first lighthouse and discovering that it was down a private road that we were not allowed to trespass on, we gave up on that idea as well.

I suggested that we go check out Cavendish Beach since it was one place that Google recommended as a sightseeing destination for tourists. At this point, we were beginning to realize that Prince Edward Island is largely a beach destination for Canadians. Greg and I are not beach people.

It was a very windy day with a crispness to the air, but the size of the dunes protected the beach goers from most of it.

After checking out the beach, we walked in the opposite direction along the Cavendish Dunelands Trail until we reached an overlook.

I couldn’t talk Greg into checking out the Anne of Green Gables house, so we headed to Victoria by the Sea for an early seafood dinner.

A lighthouse. At last! And it was only a short walk from the restaurant.

We finished up the day with some ice cream.

Saint Andrews

Today, Greg and I drove nearly 2 hours to take a whale watching cruise from Saint Andrews by the Sea, New Brunswick.

Saint Andrews was nothing like what I expected. Again, I was thinking we’d be visiting a quaint fishing village like the one in the television program, The Republic of Doyle.

Instead, Saint Andrews was more like an upscale seaside resort town, complete with trendy shops, inns, and restaurants. Since I’m not a shopper, we didn’t spend a lot of time wandering the streets.

Our first stop was a restaurant called The Salty Bight to get some lunch before our cruise. Once again, seafood was on the menu. We both had the chowder.

As you can tell from the photo, it was low tide.

The waitress told us that the strip of land in the distance was Maine.

On our way to the wharf, we saw this artist painting a mural.

Whale watching cruise

Holy cow. The difference between the temperature in town vs. the temperature on the water was dramatic. Before we left, I asked one of the company employees whether I needed to take my jacket, since it was sweltering in town. She recommended that I take it.

Boy, was I glad I did! By the end of the cruise, I was wearing my winter hat, my long-sleeved hiking shirt, my sweatshirt, my down jacket, and my wind breaker.

We had a prime seat inside next to the open windows. Those little boys in the background were a godsend. They had eagle eyes and were able to spot wildlife before our captain and the two marine biologists did. There were five kids in that family. They were from the Netherlands.

We saw lots of wildlife on our cruise, although we almost missed our opportunity to see a whale.

Harbor seals. We also saw some gray seals.

A porbeagle shark. He disappeared before the captain was able to turn the boat around so those of us on the other side could get a good picture of him.

We also saw a good number of porpoises, but they were too quick to photograph. It was only thanks to the little boys from the Netherlands that I got to see them at all.

A salmon farm. Every few seconds a salmon would leap out of the water.

After three hours, our time on the water had expired, and we had yet to see a whale. Then a report came in from a captain on another boat that a finback whale had been spotted. We headed that way.

The whale was almost impossible to photograph. He only broke the surface of the water every few minutes for about a second and a half, and we never knew exactly where he would surface. Maybe if I had had Neal’s camera, I would have been able to get a decent photo of him. But if you look very carefully, in the center of this photo near the horizon line, is the back of the whale.

This is what the whale looked like when he surfaced. (I didn’t take this photo. Greg found it on the internet.) Finback whales are the second-longest whales after the blue whale.

On the way back to the wharf, the captain let the children on board have a turn at the wheel.

This little girl was the oldest of the five children from the Netherlands.

We arrived at the dock and hour and a half late, but at least we got to see our whale!

The tides in the Bay of Fundy are fascinating. Because of the tidal bore, some areas of the water were as smooth as glass while others rippled with white caps. Our captain even pointed out a number of whirlpools. At one point, he let go of the wheel, and the boat went around in circles.

This photo gives some idea of how smooth the water was in some areas and how high the tide rises.

East Quoddy Head Lighthouse on Campobello Island

Saint John, New Brunswick

Today, we drove into Saint John to take a look around and find out where we needed to go tomorrow for our historic walking tour. We quickly realized that this is not the Saint John from the television program The Republic of Doyle. That St. John must be the one in Newfoundland.

This Saint John is a busy port city located on the Bay of Fundy.

According to Wikipedia, it is Canada’s oldest incorporated city, established on May 18, 1785. It has a population of about 80,000. The port is Canada’s third-largest by tonnage, and the city has a strong industrial base. This is no quaint fishing village, despite the constant cries of seagulls.

I didn’t take any photos while we were walking around. Although there were lots of beautiful old buildings, I didn’t see anything that would make a pretty picture.

After our brief walk around Saint John, we headed to Rockwood Park, a large park located within the city. Our destination was Lily’s Restaurant, where we enjoyed a seafood lunch.

We ate on the terrace overlooking the lake. It was lovely.

I had the seafood casserole. Greg had sautéed scallops. I finished the meal with coconut custard pie (which wasn’t as good as the one I make 😆).

At the table next to us, there were two ladies speaking in French. I was startled when they gave their order to the waitress in perfectly unaccented English. I expect French-speaking people to have French accents. LOL

Interestingly, our waiter told us that there were a lot of people visiting from the states back in the early spring. They were all looking to buy property in Canada. Gee, I wonder why?

Our original plan had been to take a hike along one of the trails within the park after lunch, but we were so full and sleepy that we headed back to the camper for a nap and a quiet evening.

It’s too bad, because according to the park’s website, Rockwood Park offers 2,200 acres of unspoiled natural beauty, with ten lakes and 55 trails and footpaths for walking or biking. Its billion years of history can be seen in unique rock formations, caves, and waterfalls. I’m sorry we missed it.

Along the way home, we decided to make a stop at the local lighthouse. The signs led us off the main road and down a gravel road that was under construction for about 10 miles before dumping us back onto the main road again. The lighthouse signs continued, so we know that we didn’t miss it by mistake. Why we had to drive 10 miles along a dirt road for no reason we will never know.

Anyway, at that point, I looked up the lighthouse on Google Maps and discovered that it was in the opposite direction from our campground. Ugh.