Mist Opportunities and Backpedaling


Seeing the Bluenose II sailing into the mist is a good reminder of Canadians working together to stick it to the United States. 

Somewhat bizarrely, we’re currently slightly farther away from our final destination of St. John’s compared to where last week’s blog post was published from. When we entered Nova Scotia from Prince Edward Island on July 25th, I was expecting to point my tires North-East towards St. John’s. Karen is an unstoppable cycling machine and she had other ideas. She convinced me to turn South-West, away from St. John’s, and make our way to the UNESCO heritage site of Lunenburg.


Lunenburg is the best example of a planned British colonial settlement in North America and it retains its original layout and appearance of the 1800s.


We’ve had our best and worst camping in the Atlantic provinces. Camping along the coast in New Brunswick, PEI, and Nova Scotia with beautiful beaches and fish and chip shacks has been an ongoing highlight. Our worst camping was our first night in Nova Scotia. I’m still unclear what we paid for, given the outhouses smelled like death and when I used the water pump all that came out of the tap were two centipedes. Some exploring of the area and chatting with a local taught us that the site is an abandoned amusement park-turned dilapidated campground that used to boast the longest water slide in Atlantic Canada. It’s fair to say our camping has been a real roller coaster.


We stopped at the Shubenacadie Provincial Wildlife Park on the way to Lunenburg, which is an animal reserve. In a way it felt like a highlights reel of wildlife we’ve seen this summer, including black bears, wolves, groundhogs, moose, minks, mountain goats, elk, bald eagle, and foxes. We even had a celebrity sighting of Shubenacadie Sam.


As incredible as so many of the animals were at the Wildlife Park, it’s hard to top the entertainment provided by racoons and I spent most of the visit watching them goof around. Clearly I was meant to live in Vancouver.


As a small aside, I’m trying to leave politics out of this blog but it’s mildly annoying that in June the federal government made national historic sites and federal parks free to visit, a month after we bought our Parks Canada pass. Now,  a week after we went across the Confederation Bridge, the federal government made crossing the bridge free for cyclists. It would be great if they could have coordinated these changes better with our schedule. If the feds are planning to make it free to fly bicycles from St. John’s to Vancouver, I hope the policy is implemented within the next few weeks.


Karen took this picture nearby where we stayed with another set of lovely hosts from Mennonite Your Way


Karen’s Nova Scotia book of the week: The Great Halifax Explosion

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