Hey, we’re home! So here’s the very last update!
I don’t think we even had an RVing catastrophe in the last stretch. There was the campground in New Brunswick where they locked us in. We tried to leave to go get gas (and see the world’s largest axe) at a little after 9, only to find a gate with a padlock on it blocking our way. But we survived the night and got out in the morning, so maybe not a full on catastrophe.
So we left off with our last Nova Scotia stop, in Pictou. We chose Pictou as our last stop because it’s very close to the ferry to Prince Edward Island. You can get to PEI either by ferry or by bridge; our plan was to take the ferry over and then cross back via the bridge to New Brunswick. You only pay when you leave the island, so, even though the ferry is more expensive than the bridge, it doesn’t matter as long as you take the bridge when you leave.
The only problem is that the ferry doesn’t take reservations unless you’re buying a round trip ticket. And I started reading some unpleasant sounding stuff about how few RVs they can take on the ferry and how you might be waiting a really long time to cross. And from Pictou it’s really not that long of a drive to the bridge, so time-wise it would be kind of a wash even if we did get on the first ferry we tried for. We finally decided to just go with the sure thing and take the bridge over, which really bummed Dave out because he’d been looking forward to the ferry.
But the drive was uneventful and we made it to our campground in Prince Edward Island National Park no problem (where we promptly ran the trailer into a tree. Full story in my last post). The eight mile long Confederation Bridge opened in 1997, and it’s an impressive site. I was worried it might also be terrifying for scaredy cats like me (during high winds it closes to high sided vehicles, but it was a calm day when we crossed), but it was not.
We had five nights and four full days planned for PEI, but we ended up shifting things around a bit, leaving a day early, and adding an extra night at Fundy National Park in New Brunswick instead. We’d planned to spend one of our days in Charlottetown, PEI’s capital, but it turned out that everything we’d planned to see there was closed. I’m sure it still would have been a great city to see, but everyone was liking the idea of some extra Bay of Fundy time.
We did do a long bike ride along the coast one day, stopping to see lots of cool stuff:
We did two campfire programs right at the campground:
We took Abe to the strategically placed right next to the road so your five year old will see it constantly and beg to you to go Sandspit amusement park one morning for a few rides:
And of course we did lots of Anne of Green Gables stuff. Abe’s our only kid who hasn’t read the book, but he was pretty charmed by Anne anyway:
From Prince Edward Island, we drove back across the bridge and over to Fundy National Park, where we again stayed inside the national park, at Chignecto campground. We were already big fans of the Bay of Fundy from our first stop in Nova Scotia, so we were glad to see more of it.
We explored inside the park:
Took a day trip to see Hopewell Rocks:
You can walk around down here at low tide and then come back and kayak around those rocks a few hours later at high tide:
And we spent some time in the charming little town of Alma, just outside the park:
And then back to the US! We ended up leaving the evening before we’d planned and driving a couple of hours to another campground in New Brunswick (the one that locked us in), because we had a tour at Bates College in Maine scheduled for the next day and realized that there was pretty much no way we’d make it otherwise.
Crossing back into the US was only slightly more trouble than crossing into Canada had been. The border crossing guy complained that our kids’ last names (they have both of our last names on their birth certificates, though they mostly just use Dave’s for day to day stuff) were too long and that he had to type all of them into the computer. But they let us in! Woot!
We spent two nights at the Durham/Freeport KOA in Maine and toured Bates and Bowdoin colleges with Ari. We also took full advantage of being at a busy campground on a weekend with a full activity schedule (something that didn’t happen much on this trip). Abe played on the playground, we saw some live music, took a wagon ride, and Abe went on a pony ride:
And then another long drive to my mom’s hometown of Clinton, NY, where Ari toured and interviewed at Hamilton College. We went by to see my mom’s childhood home and take a picture for her, which caused the guy who lives there now to come stand on his porch and stare at us very suspiciously. But I explained what was up and he was very nice after that and even offered to let us come in for a tour (which I politely turned down, since my mom moved out long before I was born and seeing the house now wouldn’t mean much to me. Also there are six of us and that seemed unnecessarily intrusive).
And our last big stop of the trip was to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in western PA. We had a two night stop here, thinking we’d see the house on Wednesday and then leave early Thursday. But it turned out Wednesday is the only day Fallingwater is closed, so instead we had a very lazy day at the campground and then took advantage of the 2 PM checkout time to do our tour on Thursday before we left. Our campground was about 35 minutes from Fallingwater, but, after making the drive there on the super steep and windy roads (including at least a couple of longish 13% grades), we were glad we didn’t try to get the trailer any closer.
The minimum age for house tours is 6, so we had to take turns waiting and exploring the grounds with Abe. But in the end it was definitely worth the detour; Fallingwater is amazing:
After that we had a whole lot of driving (including nearly 500 miles on our last day) and one quick overnight stop in Virginia….and we were home! Everyone was very excited to see Fiesta the beagle and the cats and chickens. And no one has to sleep on a cot here. We take the trailer in Saturday to get that bed fixed once and for all and to figure out where water is getting in (we have a leak in our real house, too. Plumber coming Tuesday. Sometimes it’s not so great essentially having two houses where everything can break. One of which you haul down the road at 65 miles per hour to hasten all the breakage).
It was an amazing trip, and there will be much, much more to come as I dig into the details of all of our stops. For now, here are links to all the update posts if you need to get caught up!
It’s all so beautiful I can’t stand it.
Why have I never been a tree for Halloween? Why?