That was brutal. Brutal but worthwhile. We left Baddeck in Nova Scotia yesterday at 5:30am and planned to travel to Marlyborough in Massachusetts, about 12 hours away. Well it got to around 3pm and I asked Jo if we should just keep going... and she, like me, was caught in the gravitational pull of getting home. So we cancelled our hotel and decided to just drive all the way back home in one hit.
We arrived home last night at about 2:20am, 21 hours after leaving Nova Scotia, having driven over 2,000 klics through New Brunswick, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York state. The kids were outstanding. The weather was not. After leaving Maine we ate dinner at a dodgy Chinese resturant (dodgy to look at, great food) and as we drove back onto the interstate the rain and wind hit really hard. I'd just taken over driving from Jo, who had dealt with some hairy traffic coming through southern Maine and New Hampshire, and had to overcome some seriously harsh conditions for the next couple of hours. The number of trucks hammering along at breakneck speed added to the excitement of not really being able to see and travelling at over 70mph. I guess after our trip to Ottawa in the ice storm last winter we can drive through anything, maybe we could drve home to Australia... need to wind the windows up. Anyway we survived and hit our own beds happy to be home after a fantastic turbo trip of the north eastern US and Atlantic Canada. We'll put the last photos up shortly and I'm downloading the video to you'll all have to suffer through another video clip really soon now :-).
So I need to relate the last few days of our trip. We crossed over the Confederation Bridge (at 13k's the longest in the world over frozen waters) onto Prince Edward Island and stayed two nights in Summerside. We needed the extended stay to recharge a little. Still popped out to Cavendish to see the house that inspired Anne of Green Gables and had a nice walk through the Haunted Wood nearby. I spent a few hours in the pub, had a couple of nice local beers and watched Texas thrash Baylor Uni (63-31)in an ultra high scoring game of college football. Next day we travelled 90 minutes along PEI to Wood Islands to catch the ferry over to Nova Scotia. We could have taken the bridge back ($40.50 is the toll!) but the ferry was a nice way to do it too. We rolled the car on and settled back for a lesuirely cruise over to Pictou in Nova Scotia. A few hours later and we were on Cape Breton Island in northern NS and settled into our loft for the evening. Next day we rose and left a little late but set off on our circuit of the Cabot Trail. It's a fairly rugged coastal route like the Great Ocean Road home in Victoria, the 300km road cuts through the cliffs of the Cape Breton National Park. We stopped and did a 2.5 hour walk along the Skyline hikiong trail and were lucky enough to see two moose, a bull (who only really showed us his huge antlers as he was sitting in long grass) and a cow who was browsing for food. Some hikers we had seen earlier had warned us about the moose who can be very agressive, especially the bulls as it is rutting season and they just want to pick fights like boguns at the Burvale. This freaked our two girls out a little and we had to really work hard to encourage them to continue the walk after our brief close encounter. As it turned out we didn't see any other moose, and appeared to be pretty lucky as everyone else we bumped into didn't see any at all. The view from the boardwalk at the end of the trail was pretty awesome, check out the 180 degree panoramic shot below, click to zoom.
Speaking of which we've taken quite a few panoramas and I haven't uploaded them before, you can see them
here if you're interested, some are pretty decent, be warned some are pretty big. We had hot dogs and fries on a beach and then wound our way back to the loft where an early night was on the cards, we cooked spagetti and watched a movie. And that was the trip, a total of 5240 k's in 11 days, 7 hotels, 4 billion calories in food, 8 very long walks, several chimpmunks, a witch trial, one very used iPod, 2 hours of video, 241 digital photos... 5 very tired Stiffies. Fall in north eastern america is a sight to see.
Andy, out.
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