Moncton NB to Québec City

Trip Odometer: 758 km

We found the best road signage in the Maritimes for tourists: Nova Scotia

We are thinking the trail in the distance with the bridge is the Trans Canada Walking Trail that is being built in every province to stretch from sea to sea. P.E.I. has completed their province's trail.  St. Lawrence River in background.

 

Saw a lot of road today!

Can you believe we arrived in Québec City to roads closed for another concert!!! Piles of people walking, police directing, and cars backed up at road blocks. At the beginning of the trip it was Québec's Summer Festival. Tonight it is Celine Dion! Instead of the 18,000 people on the streets like last time it is estimated their are 60,000!!!!

As our last hurrah we are staying at the castle!

Chateau Frontenac

I (Anna-Lee) was so excited about this. As we arrived a trumpet started playing and someone with a big drum started playing too. Mom joked that they were announcing our arrival! But a whole bunch of people from the hotel followed them out the gates and down the street, so I think they were going to the Celine Dion concert!

We went for a short walk around and then supper. We thought we'd be in good time tonight especially with the time change back an hour, but we weren't!
 

Magnetic HIll, Olivier Soapery, Flower Pots

Trip Odometer: 200 km

Speed Limit in New Brunswick - 110 km/hr on 4 lane highways and 100km/hr on 2 lane highways. 
Lots of main street and even highway roundabouts which are quite handy when directional mistakes are made!

I (Anna-Lee) loved Magnetic Hill. It was so funny. We went down to the bottom on a hill to a white post. Then we put the van in neutral, and then the car started backing up the hill. It got up to 20 km/hr and Daddy was not touching the accelerator. He only had to steer so we backed up right.

Watching as our car is being "pulled" backward up the hill! Absolute amazement at this unexplained phenomenon.

We did it about 7 times!
We did it twice forwards and 5 times backwards. We were laughing and squealing in the backseat! Dad was surprised at how fast we went and Mom thought it was hilarious.

After that we went out to The Olivier Soapery. They had a neat demonstration of making soap. I got to stir the mixture.

Having added the alkali to the fat base, the soap now needs to be stirred by hand until it solidifies. anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 hours depending on humidity.

 

All their soaps are stirred by hand so air does not get into it. Their soap is dense and sinks!

We learned a lot. Louis the XIV of France made a rule that no one could make soap using anything except Olive Oil or they could be chased out of the country!!!

We had a tour of the whole facility and then a tour of all their different soaps and what they do. It was really interesting. Their bathroom was neat. They had their bars of soap on a magnet! And then they had lots of soaps on a shelf you could try. I like when people make things interesting like that.

AND, we went back to the Flower Pots today because we wanted to see them at high tide. We didn't quite make it for high tide, but we got to see it with water and then see the tide go out. 

We missed high tide by a couple hours so we were able to get on to the ocean floor while their was still water there.

Amazing to literally watch the tide go out.

 
 It goes down (and up) one vertical foot every 10 minutes! That's fast! I saw someone put a rock on the dirt and we could watch the water back away from the rock as the tide went out. I thought that was a great idea. Every wave it seemed to be farther away from the rock.

The stone marker shows how far it went down in just 2 minutes.

I stepped onto a mud flat today. My shoes came right off because it was so thick and gooey! It is so fun down on the ocean floor. I went down twice today. I wish we could have stayed longer.

Becasue of the full moon, the tide went up 44 feet today. It also went down 44 feet! Comparing the two photos, this happened in just 45 minutes.

There is also a museum there which I thought was really interesting! There are 17 different kinds of whales in the Bay of Fundy!

I (Monica) stayed up top again while Mom, Dad, and Anna-Lee went down to the ocean floor but there is always a guide from the Hopewell Rocks up top. They switch shifts frequently so I talked to two different staff today.

I found out the first one I talked to has a brother who has a service dog from the Canadian Guide Dogs from the same place I do!
The second staff I talked to on Anna-Lee's second trip down today, showed me all sorts of videos of the Flower Pots. There was even one with a gorgeous aurora borealis over it!

Anna-Lee was so excited to see this seaweed on the ocean floor at Hopewell Rocks. She had learned about it in St. Andrew's on the whale watching tour. As she ran past she yelled back to us to notice the air pockets in the seaweed. Each of those pouches is filled with air so the seaweed floats.

Mom wanted to see a special bird that comes in by the thousands to migrate. It is the semipalmated plover. We saw  about 60 but not the flock  of thousands she was hoping for.  We found out that first all the females arrive from the arctic. Then 2 weeks later the males arrive. The babies have been left behind in the arctic BUT 2 weeks later they all arrive! Wow.
AND the Bay of Fundy is their only stop on their way to South America! They eat here for a few weeks (eating mud shrimp found in the mud flats) doubling their weight then fly NON STOP 3 days and 4 nights no break! That is amazing. The mud shrimp are usually down really deep but they come to the surface only during this time of year - when the Plover just happen to arrive! We learned all this from the Hopewell Rocks guide!

Black on top, white on their bellies, these birds dip and weave their way among one another. It is quite a show, and we can only imagine how amazing it must be with thousands doing it.

Another amazing thing was Magnetic Hill. We kept asking Dad to go again and again! On one trip, Mom got out of the car to video it!
We asked if it mattered how big the car was and they said the bigger the car the faster you go uphill.  He said tour buses zoom up the hill at around 20 -25 km/hr. We hit 20 km/hr!

Tidal Bore, Dunes, and Flower Pots

Trip Odometer: 194 km
Anna-Lee has now seen 40 different state and province license plates. 

I (Anna-Lee) think people do some silly things. We went to the tidal bore (where the tide comes into a narrow area fast). We were told that surfers from California, Paris and Canada were going to try to surf the bore today. 

At first we didn't know these were the ones, but they were the surfers waiting for the tidal bore to come.

We watched as they got into position with their surfboards. They each had a paddle too. There was a kayak that came down too. There were hundreds of people there watching - even lots of locals today to watch the surfers.

Everyone got so excited as the tidal bore arrived and the first surfer caught the wave. The full moon made it a really good one.

 

The tidal bore going past.

We went to a 12 km sand dune today too. 
 

At the Interpretive Centre they had animal prints you could press into the sand to see the kind of tracks these animals would make on the dune - gull, fox, bear, deer, raccoon...

The Centre also gave out booklets with questions that could be answered by reading the signs posted along the boardwalk. Anna-Lee took on that responsibility.

The neat thing was that on one side was sand and the other side was the grassy dune. We could wade and swim on the sand side. It was in the Northumberland Strait. There were a lot of shells and we found a  huge crab shell too.

The water was pretty nice but not a consistent temperature.

 

Anna-Lee loved jumping the waves.

Dad and I went wading and I got the bottom of my sundress soaked. It was fun. The funniest part though was that (after I changed),  I held my wet dress out the window to dry as we drove. People's expressions as we drove by were hilarious! Monica and I laughed so hard!
 

The infamous dress hanging out the window. Cause for many giggles in the backseat.

We also went to the Flowerpots (Hopewell Rocks). Low tide was in the evening today. The ocean floor had hard rocks and a bit mucky. 

They are a very long way down there!

We tried to find a spot to get Monica down but there were 98 steps! There was another spot where there were only 22 steps but they were really steep. Dad and I went and Mom stayed with Monica.

98 steps

On the ocean floor. It may look mucky but it's actually quite hard.

 

Pretty impressive

Hard on the feet. Dave ended up carrying Anna-Lee for part of it.

 

Dave and Anna-Lee are actually in this picture.

 

In need of a good clean up.

 I (Monica) liked the boardwalk out at Bouctouche. It was built by the Irving family to help the environment and was totally wheelchair accessible. The boardwalk is about 1 km long but was 2 km until a winter storm destroyed the second km of it last year.

A beautifully built boardwalk to protect the dune.

There were lots of signs informing us of different things about the dunes including the salt water marsh, birds, fish, and animals. I learned that jelly fish can be very big! There is one called the lion's mane that is 2 1/2 metres in diameter that comes in there! There is also a bird that is endagered called the piping plover that nests there.

 The 12 km dune changes shape after every storm.

We came across something new to us today. An oyster farm. Each of these black cages is to grow oysters! It went on and on and on! This was in Bouctouche.

Anna-Lee enjoys pushing me in my manual  chair which I have had to use quite a few times. Today I used it for the Flowerpots but I still couldn't get down to the bottom. Dad had to push me about 1 km of laneway to get to the top of the steps (downhill there, and uphill on the way back)! We all laughed that it wasn't going to be like the Skyline Trail on the Cabot Trail, but.... Dad thinks it was even steeper just not as long.

Even though she couldn't make it down, she had a pretty good view.

The weatherman calls for  100% chance of 20 mm of rain tomorrow but it sure was a nice red sunset.

Red at night.... Goodnight from Moncton NB.

Alexander Graham Bell Museum and Baddeck to Moncton NB

Trip Odometer: 419 km

We went to he Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck before we left today. It was really interesting. I (Anna-Lee) liked learning that he did a lot of work with the deaf. His Mom had gone almost deaf and his wife Mabel was deaf. 

I liked using the old phone - it was very heavy and hard to dial!

Dave had to teach Anna-Lee how to use the rotary dial.

Bell worked a lot with the other senses like touch and vocals in his work with the deaf, so there were lots of activities to do using touch like an alphabet you could touch out on someone's hand, and feeling in a box to see if you could figure out what was in the box by touch.
 

The touch box. Anna-Lee was given a booklet of activities to do at the museum. For each activity there were questions to answer or comparisons to make etc.

The museum also had lots of stuff he'd invented. Mom gave us a game to go look for something behind the glass that made us wonder "What on earth is that???" Then we had to guess what it was and see how close we came to what it really was.  That was a lot of fun.
 

This was Anna-Lee's object that caused her to ask "What on earth is that???" Any guesses? It is a child's toy. Bell used wind propulsion to cause toy soldiers to move.

The airplane he made was pretty neat. The pilot (not him), sat on something like a bicycle seat! It was all pretty interesting and I now want to go to the Aviation Museum when I get back home.
 

The intriguing seat for the pilot!

I always like to look into rooms. They had Bell's study set up in the museum. They said his wife gave him a painting of a night owl because he would stay up late at night working! He kept it in his study. They also said he'd get so excited when something worked he's dance a jig whirling around the room, then go  back to bed.
 

Bell's study.

We had a couple stops on the way to Moncton and one of them was in Oxford. I don't remember if it was Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, but it is the blueberry capital of Canada! We saw people stopped all along the highway picking wild blueberries! We stopped at a blueberry booth and got some yummy wild blueberries.
 

Yes, we stopped and turned around to get this photo! Who knows when we'll ever be back to the Oxford/Pugwash turnoff! (Nova Scotia by the way).

I (Monica) really enjoyed the museum too. I liked the time line about Bell and the things he did. They also had two really good videos - one of his work on the Silver Dart airplane, and the other on his work on the hydrofoil. They had life sized replicas of both. 
 

The Silver Dart.

Now this looked fun to take a ride on. Bell and his partner (Baldwin) invented the hydrofoil and also had the fastest hydrofoil on record traveling up to 113 km/hr in 1919. I bet that was a lot of fun for the person driving it. Bell never got to ride it. He just had the imagination and ideas.

It was really interesting learning about his wife Mabel. She was very supportive of her husband and was the one to initiate the Aviation Association he had with a few other men he worked with.

I also enjoyed trying to fly a kite. Kites were a big part of what Bell did in his research of aviation. Anna-Lee and I and even Mom attempted it. 

It was not easy to do!

Monica and Anna-Lee trying together.

Dad to the rescue. Bras d'Or Lake in background.

The game we played about finding something that we wondered what it was.... Mom chose something and I knew what it was!!! I knew because they used it in the movie "My Fair Lady!" Mom thought that was pretty impressive.

This is what Mom chose and Monica had seen in the movie. A flame would move to different shapes depending on the vocal sound made. That would show up as different patterns on the revolving mirror. He used it for deaf students to show them patterns of sound. It is called a manometric capsule -Monica did not know that part!

We couldn't stop to get a better photo of this one. This is the Canso Causeway connecting Cape Breton to mainland Nova Scotia. Bye NS.

I really like where we are staying in Moncton. It is very wheelchair accessible and I like being back near the Bay of Fundy.

 

Fortress of Louisburg

Trip Odometer: 240 km
Price of Gas in the Maritimes: 141.8

I (Anna-Lee) really looked forward to Fortress of Louisburg becasue we had studied a lot about the French and English and Louisburg before we came. I enjoyed going into all the different houses of the people I had read about like the Governor and the Captains and the Engineer. It was neat to know it was a specific person's home, not just any old Captain. The home really belonged to a person they know lots about. Everything in the home is a model of what his real family really had in their home. Records show a complete inventory of specific items - even toys for the children!

This was a Captain's home. He had two day servants.

My favorite part was doing needlepoint bargello in a flame pattern. I also learned how to do lacing and caligraphy! 

Once this is done it would be put on a stool or bench. Anna-Lee wished she could have returned  to do more, but they closed before we could get back!

Turkey feathers were used as the quills.

The bakery baked 350 loaves of bread today and sold them all! The soldiers would get one loaf of bread as their rations and it had to last 4 days! We got to lift one of the loaves they would have gotten. It weighed 6 pounds and if you knocked on the top it was like a brick! They had to dip their bread in something in order to be able to eat it!

We also saw the soldiers do a musket drill - it was loud but not nearly as loud as the cannon!

See the cannon on top of the wall way up there. Read Monica's part as to where Dave got her!

 

This is a hole in the wall - a casemate - that acted as storage, a prison and also to hide the women and children during a siege.

Dad helped me (Monica) to be able to do some of the Fortress, but a lot of it was not wheelchair accessible. There were quite a few buildings that they decided not to ramp in order to keep them the way they were. Mom was disgusted with that decision as they chose to have modern toilets so she thought it was a bit of a cop out. However, Dad got me some places that likely a wheelchair had never been - like up on the wall with the cannons overlooking the fields.

Mom didn't want to look at times to see where Dad was taking me, but she forced herself in order to get some pictures!

 

The building in the background is where the governor's quarters was, the soldiers barracks, a chapel, and the prison!

A 40 foot drop to the left of the edge of the wall where Dave is standing. Anna-Lee does not seem to have any issue with heights on this trip! She has made Mom's heart lurch a few times!

He also helped me to be able to try both the needlework and  the lacing by moving furniture and turning the needlepoint frame!

The more lace a woman wore, the higher class she came from as it was only something someone with free time and the ability to read and do math could do. One inch of lace took one hour - once you were good at it. This lady was so nice. As we were leaving she came running out to give us a bookmark of lace in the pattern the girls had worked on to take home with them.

Dad got to play one of the games the soldiers would have played back then. Anna-Lee tried it out too.

We had a really interesting tour as well. Did you know you can tell a true gentleman by the way they stand? A true gentleman turns his one leg out so his calf can be seen. A muscular calf indicated he had spent time dancing on his toes which meant he had free time and money.

There were so many people at the fortress in costume and they had a lot fo knowledge about the people, the history, and how to manage daily life.I really liked how they talked to us about all sorts of stuff. History like this is fun!
 

We are closing the place down with this picture and it's starting to get a bit chilly. Very windy on the Atlantic Ocean and Louisburg is right n the tip of Cape Breton. Mom's comment as she took this picture was "Smile and try and pretend you're not cold!"