Habs on the Road

Day 28

We headed to Nova Scotia today! The dogs woke up at 4:30am (after we got to sleep around midnight), so we just stayed up and finished getting ready.

All loaded up!!

We dropped the dogs off at Acadia Woods Kennel at 7am.

We then started the 3.5 hour drive north to Saint John, New Brunswick. Really pretty scenery with the vibrant Fall colors!

We crossed the Canada border into New Brunswick, which was a new province for us!

Canada!!

The first things we noticed that were different than the USA were the road signs, which have both English and French writing. And all signs use kilometers!

We switched the Jeep to metric units, and the navigation screen made it easy to compare the speed limit to our actual speed in km/hr.

Gas pumps use liters instead of gallons. Also, you leave your card inserted until you select your amount. It kind of grabs onto your card, which I didn’t know and I forcefully yanked out my card, which cancelled the transaction! Had to start over…

Inside the gas station you could buy fireworks out of a small cabinet…odd!

Carla noticed that there were suddenly a lot more evergreen trees after we got into Canada, which made it look more like Washington. So pretty, and rocky!

We grabbed a bite to eat at Tim Horton’s, which is a popular chain up this way. Good food! We then headed over to the ferry terminal and walked along the beach at the Bay of Fundy until the ferry arrived. The Bay of Fundy has the largest tide in the world, which can be 53′ high in some areas!

Tripp and I skipped rocks into the ocean:

Here comes the Fundy Rose ferry! It’s huge!

All loaded up in the ferry!

Once inside we were surprised at how big it was and how many different areas there were, like a small cruise ship!

We changed seats a few times during the 2.5 hour trip to Digby, Nova Scotia.

We arrived in Nova Scotia, which was pretty exciting, even though it was cold and raining!

We headed 2 hours across NS to Lunenburg, which is a neat little coastal town about 300 years old.

So many dirt roads that are begging me to drive on them!!

Lots of picturesque barns and other buildings along the way!

Pretty much EVERY church looks just like this one in rural Nova Scotia:

Oh yeah, so there are some funny road signs in Canada…strange icons for some things we had to look up on the Internet to see what they meant.

We finally made it to our destination for the day! Lunenburg! Such a neat town!!

The room we got is so neat! It’s a two story room that feels like a cabin. It was built in 1863! Downstairs is a little deli and pizza place that is always packed! We checked in by visiting their checkout counter in the deli (neat / odd!). We then ordered a couple of pizzas, which were so good!!

Day 29

We got up early in order to meet the Nova Scotia Jeep Club at Tim Horton’s in Middle Sackville, about an hour away (just outside Halifax). It was neat to finally be meeting these guys and getting ready to hit the trails!

The first trail we did was Ellershouse Power line, which included a few spur trails here and there. REALLY awesome trail!!

Absolutely beautiful scenery!!

We took a lunch break at the base of a huge windmill:

I had Dean, their club president who had arranged the trail run for us, put on the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick province stickers on our Jeep! So neat!

Dean then gave me an honorary club sticker, which I proudly put on our Jeep!

We then went on to a different trail called Big John, which was a bit more technical in places…so fun!!

One guy’s wheel slid into a huge boulder and broke off his valve stem, which caused a flat.

In the process, he dislodged the boulder and it ended up in the way of passing by it…time to use a winch to move it!

I got to use my snatch block (pulley) to allow them to winch the boulder to the side using a tree, which was neat (first time to use it!)

After 7 hours of trails, it was time to head back. I hated for it to come to an end! Time to air back up!

We all really had a lot of fun, and definitely one of the best days of my life…off-roading 2000 miles from home in a beautiful province with some of the nicest people we’ve ever met.

Avin said, “If we come back to Nova Scotia, can we go offroad with this these people again?”. Tripp said that if we ever decided to move from the USA, he would want to move to Nova Scotia. I was glad they had so much fun!

We drove our filthy Jeep to the nearest gas station so Carla could finally pee (she held it for 7 hours!), and then headed back to Lunenburg.

We ate at The Old Fish Factory (funny because it sounds like the Old Spaghetti Factory).

We could also see the ocean side of the Inn we are staying at:

We’re all tired from a long day of being tossed around in the Jeep!

Day 30

We left the Inn in Lunenburg and drove south along the Atlantic coast toward West Dublin on our way to Risser’s Beach Campground.

It was a beautiful drive!

We took the Lahave Ferry to cross the Lahave River, and that was the first time I’ve ever been on a cable ferry. It pulls a cable between two wheels inside the middle of the boat so the boat doesn’t have to fight the current as it crosses the river.

The campground is awesome! Right in the Atlantic!

The site I had picked out (#20) had a path down to the beach, but…it was super windy at our site! I was getting a little concerned. The strong wind made every little task a challenge…and a little cold! We put up with it for a while and then headed down to the beach.

Got a fire going and ate hotdogs…yummmm!!

The wind started picking up a lot! So much so that it was squashing our tent!! I’ll post a video later.

I decided to move us aacross the road to a site that backed up to woods and was far less windy! So we started the migration of all of our stuff! Moving the tent across the road was awkward, with the wind shoving it all o er the place.

We were very glad to be in the new site. Then I realized I had forgotten to pack the kids’ sleeping mats!! Dang!!!! Luckily, there was a town about 20 minutes away called Bridgewater and we were able to get an air mattress at Walmart. First time to go to Walmart in Canada! Check out the spelling of Supercenter:

When we got back, kids immediately built a fire completely on their own (I taught them well

Carla getting some dinner going for us:

We then went down to the beach at sunset to walk around. Such a beautiful evening!! Hard to believe we are on the edge of North America in Nova Scotia (the farthest north we’ve been on the east coast), camping on the Atlantic. Very surreal!

Once in a while I like to look at Google Maps to see how far from home we are, and how close to other countries we are.

When we got back to our site from the beach, I saw a pair of bright glowing eyes in the woods. It was a huge raccoon! He turned and went off deeper into the woods.

Time for s’mores, Avin’s favorite part of having a fire!

The GoalZero Yeti was great to have!

Well….the night started off fine, but then the wind picked up. I’m very glad we switched sites earlier because even in this new site the tent would frequently shake pretty hard and wake us up thinking an animal was tearing down our tent! We were also afraid one of the many dead trees (“widow makers”) would fall on us. We got maybe 3-4 hours of sleep all night, if that. The kids, however, slept through all of it just fine!

Day 31

After a rough night of sleep, we got up and got breakfast going.

We then went down to the beach again to play around and do some tidepooling.

We found this carved into a rock…so neat:

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We decided to not stay the second night for a few reasons. It would likely be raining later today and into tomorrow, and we didn’t want to deal with packing up all our gear in the rain. Also, adding rain to the wind would make the night worse than last night as far as sleep goes.

This next photo was officially the start of our trip back home to Arkansas. 30 days on the road so far! Amazing what all we’ve gotten to see and do!

On our way out of the campground, I stopped off at a guy’s camper (pulled by a Jeep!) to see if he wanted our leftover firewood. Neat guy to talk to from Toronto. We talked about Jeeps and travel for a few minutes and he said we should go drive down Crescent beach and then drive a bit further to a tiny fishing town on Bush Island. So we did!