20020524

May 24, 2002

Day 15

Start: Southport RV Park, Charlottetown, PEI 
End: Sandpoint RV Campground, Five Islands, NS
Miles: 150

The low last night was 50f; the high today was 75f under mostly sunny skies. 

When we woke, the breeze was not as bad as had been forecast, so we knew the bridge would be open. We ate, drained, unhooked the utilities, hooked up the truck, and headed west. This Southport RV Park is one we’ll remember and recommend to others.

We paid our $43.00CDN toll for the Confederation Bridge back to New Brunswick and left PEI. 

From the bridge we went across a few miles of NB and then entered Nova Scotia. We stopped at the Visitor’s Center at the border and picked up literature, brochures, a Canada cap for D, and made reservations for our campground in the Dartmouth section of Halifax for later this weekend. The wind was really whipping the flags around at this point.

We left the 104 Transcanada Highway soon after and started down the Glooscap Trail on route 2. This trail covers many of the scenic areas of the north shore of the Bay of Fundy region. Parts of this road are all right, but parts of it are not fit for modern vehicles. Since you have to go slowly in these parts, you might as well look around.

We checked in at the campground around 1:00pm. We were given a great site overlooking the Five Islands (more later on the name) and the Bay. High tide had been at 12:35 and the water was just starting to retreat. I took a picture, centered on Moose Island, the second of the Five Islands. We hooked up to the utilities, locked up the place, and headed out to explore.

The little town of Five Islands has three little restaurants (Diane’s, Adrian’s, and Granny’s) and not much more. We headed west, back to Parrsboro. There, we fueled the truck and went to the Fundy Geological Museum.

The FGM is a cute little local museum. A school class was there, having a great deal of fun at being out of school on a nice day. We toured the FGM and learned a bit about the geology of the region, and some of the animals whose fossils had been found in the rocks being studied.

Then we took a short tour along the Bay from Parrsboro, and returned to the Town Hall and Visitor’s Center, where D hoped to find the times of mass at the local church. I waited in the truck. Eventually, D returned – the person in the center didn’t have the times, and the phone was tied up receiving a fax, so she took D for a walk to the church (a block away). 

When D returned, she knew that the center person had lived in Toronto for 26 years but thought she could never go back to a big city, didn’t like Edinburgh, Scotland much either (husband’s family lives there), had lived in Parrsboro for two years, and knew most everybody around. Oh, yes, and the time of mass Sunday.

We returned to the campground and shot another picture of the same scene I’d shot earlier. Now, the water was well out away from the shoreline, perhaps 200 or 300 yards. Several people were out on the sands gathering clams. We were told some of them are doing this commercially, others just for the house.

Glooscap is a super-Indian, sort of on the Paul Bunyan scale, in local mythology. Beaver was the pesky creature around here. One day, Beaver was being really annoying, so Glooscap gathered up a huge handful of earth and threw it at him. The earth clumped as it was falling into Fundy Bay, and formed five islands jutting out from the north shore. Hence, the name Five Islands.

We sat in the sun and watched the clammers through binoculars. At low tide I took another picture of the same scene. Now you could see sand between the islands and see the sandy bottom exposed all the way to them.

About this time, a neighbor and his wife came over from their rig, which had Idaho plates. He was wearing a USN cap, so a chat started between us while the wives talked about the scenery. They’re on their way from Idaho to a ship’s reunion in Portland, Maine.

Then it turned out he was a retired sonarman, as I am, so we had to go through the “did-you-know-joe-blow” game. It turned out he had been mainly in the intelligence and training parts of the surface world, but we had sufficient common acquaintances to have a good story-session.

We had dinner in the little house on the big bay – pork chops and salad. Dolores worked on the Chardonnay some more while I had a Merlot. 

Dolores started watching the water when it got fairly close to the shore. She called me over so we could both watch a foot tall rock submerge in about five minutes. The edge of the water seems to move a few feet a minute over the shallow ground here.

I hopped out just now to take another picture of the same scene. It’s probably too dark for that shot to come out, so I’d better take more tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we’re going to putter around the edge of the bay, maybe dig a clam, and generally take it easy before we go in to Halifax on Sunday.