Month: September 2014

We decided to take the Confederation Bridge from PEI to New Brunswick. It’s an impressive 8 miles long and was built for a billion dollars in the early 1990s. Before it was named, people from PEI referred to it as “the fixed link,” for obvious reasons. The name “Confederation Bridge” honors the leading role PEI played in getting the various British colonies north of the US to organize themselves into what is now the independent Dominion of Canada.

Once over the bridge, we made a beeline for Hopewell Rocks, where the difference in tide levels in the Bay of Fundy can be easily seen among some really interesting rock formations. Yes, those are people down there in the first photo. We then returned the following morning to snap the second photo at high tide on our way down along the coast of the bay. Of course, we’re used to big tides and those at the Bay of Fundy vary in size just like everywhere else. The ebb and flow of water always creates interesting terrain.

And, we did enjoy walking among the rock formations at low tide. It was like we were in the land of the giants.

The mud flats also looked pretty amazing from the vantage point above the bay, oozy and plastic and glistening under an ominous sky.

But, let’s face it – some things in life are underwhelming. We made a reservation at a hotel right along the river in Moncton where you can see the “tidal bore.” We had read about it and been told that people can surf on the wave created when the tide reverses and, basically, pushes the river upstream. So, we stood out on the deck of the hotel overlooking the river in good time to see this effect, joining a man from St. John’s, Newfoundland, who had watched it a number of times before. It was fortunate we were talking with him, because we might otherwise have missed it. Alas, it was like waiting for the big parade and finding that only the dance schools showed up to march in it. We’re told that sometimes there is a bigger effect. That’s okay. Of course, it was kind of fun in its own way and it was a beautiful brisk evening. We were also feeling good about the meal we had just come from in neighboring Dieppe, even deeper into francophone New Brunswick. As we enjoyed our crepes francaise followed by our dessert crepes, we couldn’t help but overhear bits of the bewildering conversation at the table next to us between two twenty-something Acadian women. To us, it sounded like the sort of secret language twins sometimes adopt. It hopscotched among what we recognized as somewhat standard French to a sort of French patois to perfectly accented standard English. We later noticed in watching TV that the news anchors spoke a proper Parisian French, but the reporters did not. Fascinating.

From Moncton, we drove back to Hopewell Cape for the photo of the mostly submerged rocks and then went into Fundy National Park for a few hikes.

The signage said that in the time since the Park Service had built the boardwalk and viewing platform that got us this far into the bog, they had pulled two moose out of the muck at this spot. When the 4 meter thick peat decays, it has the same effect as quicksand.

Once we got to St. John, we checked in at our hotel and found that because of multiple conventions in town they were fully booked and had decided to upgrade us to the Presidential Suite. If only it were the Four Seasons, rather than Holiday Inn Express!

Buoyed by our good fortune, we walked downtown to take in the farmer’s market and find a place to eat dinner. The market claims to be the oldest continually operated market in North America. We were appropriately skeptical, as 1876 didn’t exactly impress us. It was, nonetheless, a very agreeable place. One of the vendors had us try dulse from Grand Manan island. It’s a dried seaweed that tastes like an exceptionally mild nori. Jim enjoyed it.

On our way to catch the ferry from Caribou, Nova Scotia, to Wood Islands, Prince Edward Island, we stopped by to see the reproduction of the Hector, famous as the ship that began the substantial migration from Scotland resulting, for a time, in the provinces of Nova Scotia and PEI being predominantly Gaelic speaking. Its 1773 voyage with 189 colonists followed a similar voyage with Scottish immigrants to Boston. Amanda’s father’s family reputedly immigrated to Louisiana from Scotland, by way of Canada, so we looked for the Buchanan tartan, among the tartans adorning the lamp posts in the town.

The biggest surprises about PEI were just how much of a farming community it is and how big a role Anne of Green Gables plays in the tourist economy (and what it means to be Canadian). Setting out on our drive from the ferry port to Charlottetown, we were struck with how much the island looked like an idealized and even more rural Lancaster County, PA. The rolling fields were quite beautiful and very prosperous looking. Agriculture is a very big part of the economy of the province. It also fits in well with the spirit of Anne, the spunky heroine of a series of books that even Mark Twain admired. We checked out the musical version during our first evening in Charlottetown. Above a tourist adorns a straw hat with red pigtails (Anne’s signature look) to pose in front of her childhood home, now a national park site.

With such an abundance of seafood, we decided to eat our way around PEI. We started with excellent lobster rolls for lunch down at the harbor when we arrived in Charlottetown. For dinner, we went to a small family-run restaurant downtown for mussels and oysters. Lunch the next day was at a little restaurant along the road in St. Peter’s where we had a curried seafood chowder and fried scallop sandwich, followed by a late afternoon snack of Malpeque oysters at Stanley Bridge (above), and a dinner with grilled scallops and smoked salmon. Yum, indeed!

The French and the British – where do we start in talking about them? They were at each other’s throats for hundreds of years. The French got off to a stronger start in building a stake in North America, but lost out in the end, except for two tiny islands off Newfoundland. But, the Fortress at Louisbourg played an interesting role in their dramas.

Founded in 1713, Louisbourg was a key transit point for the North Atlantic trade. Many ships would make for Louisbourg from Europe and then make their way down the coast to Boston, New York and Philadelphia. So, it was of tremendous strategic importance and there were impressive fortifications around the 2 1/2 to 3 mile circumference.

Indeed, there was a lot of unease among the British colonists in what are now the New England and Middle Atlantic states over the strength of the French fortress at Louisbourg and the threat posed by Catholic France to the colonists’ interests in fishing, trade and religion. It was the Province of Massachusetts Bay’s legislature that led a coalition of colonies (including New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New Hampshire) to form and provision an army and a naval force to attack the fortress. As part of the War of the Austrian Succession or King George’s War the New England coalition laid siege to the imposing fortress and succeeded in forcing a capitulation in 1745. Three years later, much to the annoyance of the British colonists, Britain traded Louisbourg back to the French. Then, in 1758 the British themselves laid siege to the fortress and laid it to ruin. Although the French seemed to be able to thrive in the harsh environment, the British detested the place and had no interest in allowing it to again become strategically important.

In the 1960s the Cape Breton mines closed and, to help provide jobs, development funds were found to reconstruct about 1/5 of the Fortress and furnish many of the buildings based on architectural drawings, archeology, and such documentation as household inventories. Today, it is a National Historic Site run by Parks Canada.

The Governor’s Apartments in the King’s Bastion, as well as many properties throughout the reconstruction, have costumed interpreters to bring the fortress to life.

Quite a number of artifacts have been returned to the fortress, including this cross looted in 1745 that is now on loan from Harvard University.

As for us, it was our only consistently miserable day so far. Despite the blowing rain, the Fortress of Louisbourg was a very interesting place to visit, filled with interpreters eager to share their early 18th century perspective.

On our way to Cape St. Mary’s we were keeping an eye out for moose along the road way. When we mentioned this at the interpretation center it was explained that this was the most southerly tundra and hence not appealing to moose. We did however see a pair about to cross the road shortly after we left the sanctuary and the tundra environment. Unhappy moose encounters are a big cause of accidents up here. We drove through two automated moose detection zones on the highway where lights are to flash when a moose is detected on the roadway. Of course, both of the zones were “out of order.” But, sorry, back to Cape St. Mary’s, the reason for the route we chose to take the ferry at Argentia.

This is why they come. At different times of year, you can see nesting colonies of sea birds, all stratified on the rocky islands and cliffs by species. During our visit, all that remained on “bird rock” were northern gannets. In fact, this is the most southerly of northern gannet nesting colonies – with more than 20,000 birds. It is a spectacular sight. When there are multiple bird species nesting here, it must be overwhelming. With just the gannets, the sky was thick with circling birds (and they made quite a racket).

Cape Spear National Historic Site features the oldest extant lighthouse in the province, restored to its 1836 splendor. Actually, it’s quite handsome and only about an hour outside of St. John’s. It must certainly afford magnificent views when not fogged in. Making our way around the steep slopes and down towards the water, the fog horn was deafening if you happened to be near the front of it when it sounded.

Some nice people also wandering around in the fog agreed to take our picture.

Fortunately, Cape Spear also has a functioning lighthouse.

Cape Spear happens to be the most easterly point in North America. Amanda made sure to properly document our achievement. The fog was beginning to lift. To go any further east, we’ll take the plane, thank you.

Back on the other side of St. John’s, Signal Hill commands the entrance to St. John’s harbor.

Below, the Queen’s Battery provides the guns . . .

. . . to guard the channel leading into the harbor. That’s Cape Spear in the distance.

On our way east, we passed by Gander, the favored emergency landing spot for North Atlantic airtraffic and stopped to hike at Terra Nova National Park. With budget cuts to Parks Canada, the visitor center was closed, but we headed out on what turned out to be a fairly grueling loop walk that took us up and down along both a saltwater inlet and freshwater lake and over the hill in between. Along the way, we encountered a group of spruce grouse hanging out on the path.

In another out and back adventure (remember the lack of roads), we took the road out to near the end of the Bonavista peninsula to the town of Elliston, justly famous as the most likely place to see puffins from land. As we knew beforehand, it was well passed the time of year to see puffins, except for a few stragglers. So, we were pleased to see perhaps five or ten puffins on a little island close by shore with just a “tickle” of water running in between. The puffins would try to find a good landing place with a beak full of fish and be harassed by the much larger seagulls trying to steal a meal from the puffins.

Elliston also claims to be the root cellar capital of the world. As far as we could tell, they may just be unrivaled on that score. There were plenty of root cellars evident around town.

A little further out at Cape Bonavista was the nicest lighthouse we’ve ever visited. The lighthouse keeper had a prestigious position in the community and the home reflected his status. The living quarters were spacious and nicely appointed by 19th century standards. The downside was that he (or his assistant keeper) had to wind the mechanism to rotate the light every two hours during the night.

The plant life in the mountaintop bogs is also quite interesting. It includes carniverous plants (they have to get their nutrients from something, after all) and this cotton grass (the flowers of which were used as lamp wicks by the Arctic peoples).

One of the striking features of the park is The Tablelands, a barren section of the mountain that is a very rare example of a portion of the earth’s mantle pushing up through the crust. Because it is mantle, the composition of the rock is very unusual. It’s called peridotite and has a lot of magnesium and iron and toxic levels of heavy metals. When pieces of it break open from the normal action of the freezing and thawing water, you can see the dark interior of the rocks on the surface. The brownish surface is essentially rust and plant life is quite sparce throughout the exposed mantle area due to the toxicity of the resulting soil.

We stopped by Flower’s Cove, saving the airfare to Australia, to see thrombolites. A little dog greeted us in the parking area and led us out to the site.

Lighthouses line the coast . . .

. . . as well as outhouses.

It was this spot that brought us so far north. Here is where Leif Erikson established a base camp, occupied for ten years in a fifteen year period around 1000 AD. He wanted to gather the natural bounty available further south in “Vinland” (most likely current New Brunswick) to support the colonies in western Greenland. Here is the oldest documented spot – with tangible human artifacts – occupied both by Europeans and Native Americans, where the humans who left Africa heading east ended up at the same place as those heading north and west, completing a circle.

After the initial archeological work, Parks Canada took over and developed a National Historical Site (and UNESCO World Heritage Site) that includes both a museum with the artifacts recovered and a reconstruction of a number of the “Viking” huts. The ridges in the field are, of course, the dig site and one of the huts is directly below.

We know the L’Anse aux Meadow (yes, it’s butchered French) site was a base camp, rather than an attempt at settlement because the buildings are all close together, rather than spaced out into farmsteads such as the settlements in both eastern and western Greenland. The huts themselves are quite spacious and extremely well insulated with wall construction of peat, birch bark and gravel, giving them an R rating of 100. The only detail as to which the archeologists are uncertain is the construction of the smoke holes, although we do know that the huts were very smoky because the life expectancy of women (who spent a lot more of their time inside) was less than that of men and their second leading cause of death (after childbirth) was lung disease. In the reconstructions they’ve compromised and burn propane so that the reenactors have safe working conditions.

The Norse around the year 1000 were a relatively sophisticated people with complex social and religious systems (including an opportunistic nod to Christianity) and some technology. At L’Anse aux Meadow they smelted iron using bog iron and produced nails used to repair their boats. In Europe they were highly effective as both raiders and traders, ranging as far as the Middle East and Africa. And, we were told by our Norse/French Canadian guide, “viking” is a verb for raiding, not a noun. In fact, the iconic image of Viking helmets with horns was apparently an invention of propagandists whipping up support for effective defenses against the Norse. Only one iron Norse helmet was ever found – and it lacked horns.