Blog Archive

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

June 25 -27 On Prince Edward Island

June 25 -27 . We spent three days on Prince Edward Island. That gave us some time for an arranged tour and time for us to wander around and do some sight seeing on our own and really get a feel for this beautiful Island. One of the places the tour took us to was the house that Lucy Maud Montgomery was raised in and was the setting for her book ”Anne of Green Gables”.

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The home is in a farm setting with a barn and various out buildings and lots of woodland. The house and furnishings are now a national park.

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Besides seeing the house and buildings, we were told that it is “a must” that you take a walk on Lovers Lane.
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We then went to the shore to get a look of what the coast looks like. In general it is relatively low, with no jagged cliffs. There were posters with stories of the islands history.

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There are many old lighthouses but they are threatened by modern technology. The boats in use today all are equipped with GPS and do not rely on the lighthouse for navigation. There are other structures that look like lighthouses but serve a different purpose. We did see a pair of lighthouses that were now used as range lights. The boats use them for direction information
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We then went to an inlet that had fishing boats and a fish market. There lobster boats coming and going. I took a picture of and Jackie & Ann, one of the other ladies in our caravan, by one of the boats. The lobstermen were all very friendly and seemed anxious to talk to us about their work. One interesting thing is that the lobster season varies from province to province and they are all short. Here the season is 2 ½ to 3 months. So for that time the men work the traps in all kinds of weather. After the season, the boats are pulled out of the water and the lobstermen go on our equivalent of unemployment until the next year’s season starts. If you wanted to buy a lobster trap, used ones were for sale for $10.00 each. There was a truck there to move the boats to and from the lift. That slogan pretty well describes the business plan

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Here is a picture of this harbor and a container of good eating

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Included in this tour was lunch at a restaurant. The food was good but what got the ladies excited was the decor. They had quilts on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. After lunch we drove through Charlottetown. It is where Canada was formed on July 1, 1867. At that time three British colonies were formed into four Canadian Provinces, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

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The place we are staying has a really neat trampoline. That may not be the proper term as one guy I was talking to called it a bounce pillow. Anyway, it is inflatable and is surrounded with sand that is quite soft when you walk on it. It is almost impossible for the kids to hurt themselves unless they bounce into each other. Near the campground there are a lot of amusement facilities to keep families, especially the kids entertained.
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It is well worth the time to take a ride around the countryside. The entire island has been settled, there towns, parks or farms. Potatoes are a big crop here and much of the crop is made into French fries ro “frites”. The cold spring they had here has affected the farmers. Even though we are passed mid-June, the fields are still mostly dirt, with very little green showing. A local told us that with a couple of days of sun and warm weather the fields will turn green overnight. The wild flowers growing along the road side are spectacular. The two main ones you are lupins and flox.

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The estuaries are home to shell fish farms where muscles and oysters are grown. What you see are rows of floats that hold the bags from just below the surface and above the bottom. In winter, ice that fill the estuaries can drag the floats and bags containing out to sea during te thaw. To prevent this, in winter the floats are weighted to sink them safely below the bottom of the ice. The farms depend on the tides to bring plankton and other nutrients that feed the shell fish.

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A government conspiracy??? I think I have found a space shuttle the government has been hiding since the program began. And a town name that you don’t see everyday.

Finally, ther are more pictures at: http://summer2011jb.shutterfly.com/pictures/1193

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Monday, June 27, 2011

To Caraquet NB and to Cavendish PEI

Wednesday, June 22. We traveled form Perce QC to Caraquet NB. There was some French spoken but the official language is now English. In Quebec provenance the road signs were only in French. The log the caravan company gave us did have a list of French to English translations to help us along the way. Fortunately Jackie remembers a lot of the French she learned. It helped quite a bit when we were in stores.
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The roads we were on went along the coast. There were many coves and little harbors and a few light houses. Around 10:30 AM, heading west, looking to our left across the bay we saw a factory and a smoke stack that was sending a white plume into the sky. Then about 2:30 PM, heading east we passed it again. It was like we spent that last several hours making one big “U” turn.
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We stopped in one of the many rest areas for lunch. It is very impressive to see how clean everything is and well maintained public places are. While much of the maintenance is done by government workers, the public does a fantastic job keeping the country side clean. I have seen so many individuals stop to pick up papers, etc and dispose of them properly.
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In Caraquet on Thursday June 23, the agenda called for us to go to an Acadian Historic Village. The Acadians were French and were living here when the English defeated the French in the late 1700’s Many of these people were shipped back to France. Others hide out or traveled to the Louisiana Territory which was owned by France at that time. These people became what we know today as the Cajuns. Having seen similar old time villages, Jackie & I passed on this and spent the time relaxing after getting our laundry done and cleaning up the motor home. There's a few more pictures at: http://summer2011jb.shutterfly.com/pictures/1011

June 24, I was low on fuel and gassed up in Caraquet at the low price of $4.80/gal. The previous fill up was at $4.92/gal. $4.80 felt like they were almost giving the gas away :). After weeping quietly to myself we were off to Prince Edward Island.
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Since we have been in Canada we have seen many “Tim Horton” fast food places. We haven’t been in one yet but we will let you know what they are like when we visit one. At the Kouchibuguac River (the pronunciation is waaay beyond me) there was this bridge.
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That was the “little” bridge. The big bridge is the Confederation Bridge that takes you to PEI. At 8 miles long, it is the worlds longest “over ice-covered water” bridge. The movement of the ice during the spring presented challenges to the designers and engineers. It replaced the ferry service which was costing the Canadian government significant sums of money each year in maintenance and replacements. It took four years to build and required more than five thousand workers and cost one billion dollars.

Quoting from the reference: “The Confederation Bridge is 11 metres wide, and has a 3.75 metre-wide lane for traffic in each direction, with a shoulder on each side. It features a hollow corridor through which a series of cables run, carrying utility services from the mainland to Prince Edward Island. “ Here is a picture of the cross section.
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If you are interested in reading more about the bridge go to: http://www.confederationbridge.com/en/index.php

As you might expect, you need more than a few quarters to use this bridge. A strange thing (to me) is that you pay the toll on the way back to the mainland rather than on the way to the island.

Maybe they want you to have more money to spend while you are there. The tolls are: $43.25 for the first two axles and $7.00 per each additional axle. So, with the motor home and tow car, I have four axles. There are information centers on both sides of the bridge. We stopped on the island side where we found shops and restaurants.
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After leaving the information center it was a relatively short drive to the KOA in Cavendish located on the north-east side of the island.
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More Pictures at: http://summer2011jb.shutterfly.com/pictures/1142