More Nova Scotia: 2018 East Coast Tour Update #5

A cautionary tale about Verizon’s “Beyond Unlimited” plan: if you ask, when you sign up for the unlimited plan, if it will work the same in Canada, the folks at Verizon will tell you that absolutely it will. And then, when you cross into Canada, you’ll get a friendly text telling you that you’re all set with your awesome unlimited plan; enjoy the trip! But buried deep in the fine print is the part where if you use more than 512 mb of data per device a day, they’ll slow you down to 2G speeds. Now. If you’re someone who’s paying for the Beyond Unlimited plan, you probably want to use more than 512 mb of data a day (or you’re bad at math and shouldn’t have the Beyond Unlimited plan). To sum up: we’re behind on both baseball watching and blogging after a month in Canada, so this post will race through the rest of our time in Nova Scotia.

Because we’re back in the US now! Less than a week to go! Everyone’s feeling pretty excited about getting home, but we still have a few fun things left to do and see. And Ari has a college interview, which he does not consider to be a fun thing to do. But he’ll survive.

RVing catastrophe of the week:

This is Cavendish Campground in Prince Edward Island National Park, and this is our trailer rubbing up against a tree as we were trying to get into the site. To be fair to Cavendish, the site description warned that this is a narrow site that might not have room for slides and that might be hard to back into. To be fair to us, we saw that and plunged forward anyway because we don’t have slides and because it was a pull-through site.

But it turns out the site is narrow in the sense that there are giant trees lining both sides of it, making it really, really hard to make the turn into it with a big old trailer like ours. Once we were good and stuck, I fled to the playground with Abe and left Dave to clean up the mess, reasoning that my panic attack was likely not helping matters. But by then we had a plan to work with, which was 1. putting a call in to roadside assistance so someone could come get us out of the mess if we couldn’t get out ourselves and 2. unhitching and rehitching the van at a very, very precise angle to get the trailer to swing away from that tree and safely into the site.

And step #2 worked! I came back from the playground just as Dave was pulling in. Ari and Milo had heroically stayed behind to help, and everyone worked together to get it done. Yay teamwork!

Then I spent the next few days fretting about whether we were going to be able to get back OUT of the site, since it was just as full of trees on the other end. But we did! Yay again!

More on Prince Edward Island in the next update; now for more Nova Scotia!

From Annapolis Royal, we went south to the Halifax area, where we stayed about 25 minutes from downtown at Woodhaven RV Park. We had five nights here, and we packed a lot of stuff in. We went to Peggy’s Cove and took pictures of the lighthouse because it’s the law that you have to do that when you go to Nova Scotia:

And I stuck with the resolution I made last year to always say yes when someone offers to take a picture of all of us, so we have a family picture for this trip:

We went into Halifax three times, went to a gazillion museums, and celebrated our first Canada Day. First with fireworks at a park near the campground the night before:

And then at the Citadel:

It’s possible we overdid it with museums in Halifax (at least as far as Abe was concerned), but there are so many museums in Halifax! Anyway, we saw the Citadel again a couple of days after Canada Day:

We saw the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic:

…the Immigration Museum at Pier 21 (sort of the Canadian equivalent of Ellis Island), where we went ahead and became Canadian citizens. Just kidding. You can’t really do that by visiting the museum:

….the Discovery Centre, which everyone loved because there was an exhibit about the history of video games:

…and the natural history museum, where there is a tortoise named….Gus! He gets to walk around the museum every day, but, sadly, we weren’t there when that happened:

We also biked drove to Mahone Bay one day and biked from there to Lunenburg. My phone told me there was a heat advisory, so we didn’t bother bringing jackets. Turned out it was about 60, with wind and fog in Lunenburg, and we were all freezing.

After Halifax, we headed east to Cape Breton Island. For the first few days we stayed in Baddeck and toured the gorgeous Cabot Trail:

And made a surprising number of kites at the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site:

Then we headed just about an hour away to Mira River Provincial Park, our home base for checking out the Fortress of Louisbourg:

And the Cape Breton Miners Museum, where we went on a tour of a coal mine (at least the big kids and Dave did. Abe and I turned around after the first five minutes. The ceilings in the tunnel get down to 42″ and I was not having any fun with that. I would make a terrible coal miner):

We also saw The Men of the Deeps, a choral group made up of retired coal miners (they were fabulous):

From here we moved on to Pictou, our very last stop in Nova Scotia (sniff, sniff). Pictou is yet another adorable seaside village:

We used Pictou both as our jumping off point to get to Prince Edward Island and as a base camp for taking a day trip to Sugar Moon Farm, where you can learn how they make maple syrup and eat at the awesome restaurant (and, of course, try the maple syrup):

And that was it for Nova Scotia! Which was sort of very sad. We miss you already Nova Scotia!

 

 

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