So about those e-pushpins – they continue to get added even as we’re traveling. I like chatting up locals and often get comments like: you gotta visit XYZ!! And then there’re the e-pushpins that add themselves like: there’s something wrong with the brakes on our 6-ton RV – where’s the nearest brake service!? Each addition often spawns a few more (why waste a visit to an unexpected town?) and so the pushpin count continues to grow.
Continue reading “Nova Scotia’s Atlantic Shore”
Kejimkujik was established as a National Park in 1969, preserving old growth forest, a landscape for rare wildlife and waterways traveled by the Mi’kmaw people for thousands of years. In 1995, it was also designated as a National Historic Site celebrating the Mi’kmaw culture. The canoe routes were used to travel between the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic Coast (with portages). Traces left behind by the original indigenous people included stone carvings (petroglyphs) on outcroppings along the rivers. These portray the typical Mi’kmaw life including hunting, fishing and wildlife. Being semi-nomadic, the Mi’kmaw spent winters inland, away from the colder coast while stocking up on fish and other food from the sea during the summer.
Continue reading “Kejimkujik National Park”
I’ve always had a fascination with travel and for the past 20 or 30 years (give or take a few) whenever Doug or I learned of an interesting place to visit we put a pushpin on an electronic map. (It actually started with a little silver bucket with small pieces of paper and a pen on the bookshelf in our living room – our ‘Bucket List’ bucket – evolving from bookshelf to computer to The Cloud, but the concept still holds.) (We also keep track of the source of each so that friends who made the recommendations receive proper attribution.) Anyhow, as we got close to retiring those e-pushpins were nearly out of control. We’ve now spent a good part of the last 12 years reining things in, tracking and checking off the locations, marking some for a possible revisit, thanking the folks who sent us somewhere, and learning effective strategies to navigate our pushpin map.
So, here we are in Nova Scotia.
Continue reading “The North Coast of Western Nova Scotia”
Saint John, NB (not to be confused with Saint John’s, NL), is the oldest incorporated city in Canada, and the 2nd largest city in New Brunswick. Its location where the Saint John River meets the Bay of Fundy made it the perfect spot for heavy industry and shipping. The city now boasts of reinventing itself as it modernizes and expands into more high-tech industry, tourism (it’s now a major stop for cruises on the east coast) and the arts.
Continue reading “Saint John, NB”
Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada is just across the short Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge from Lubec, ME. Not quite 1/3 of this island is taken up by the Roosevelt Campobello International Park, jointly administered by Canada and the US, preserving Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s summer home and surrounding land.
Continue reading “Campobello Island”
There are several places we could have chosen to cross into Canada from Maine. As superlatives nerds, we chose Lubec, ME because it’s the easternmost town in the continental US. OK, it’s also a cute little coastal city with shops, restaurants and a great hardware store. Also the easternmost campground, Sunset Point RV Park, which happens to be a great place to spend a couple days of R&R after the reunion festivities. Just outside of town is the West Quoddy Lighthouse, the easternmost point in the continental US.
Continue reading “Lubec, ME and Superlatives”
We were positively gleeful, back in 2024, when the power company informed us they would take down 4 large trees in front of our house that were interfering with their power lines. We had been thinking about hiring someone to do that since the trees were old, overgrown, misshapen, not healthy looking, hanging over the roof on our 2nd-floor bedroom and rubbing against the siding in our kitchen. They also created a dark, damp corner in our house.
Maybe once they’re gone we could do some landscaping and turn the now open space into a garden bed…
Continue reading “Garden refresh”
We’re at a point in our travels where we want to fill in some blank spots on our map. This year, we’re aiming to capture a bunch of of e-push pins in the Maritimes and Quebec. So, here we are already in Lubec, ME (the subject of a future post) where we can throw a rock into New Brunswick!
Our departure was unusual for this trip. Doug’s 50th college reunion (already in the past, another future post) dictated a fixed departure date. A month before departure day, we had one distraction/interruption after another – hiccups in our planned upgrades to the RV electrical system (future post), delays in a landscaping update for the house/yard (future post), toe surgery and dental extraction for Sue (no future post!), meeting with a new ophthalmologist and a new set of eye drops for Doug (same). That left us barely enough time to pack, and none at all to write up this intro post before leaving…
Fortunately, in our 12th year of doing these trips we know pretty much what we need. We loaded everything into the RV, shut the doors and headed east. We’ll re-sort our way through the packing when we have a chance…
This time we made it! Yes, we finally got to visit the south west! And yes, we really enjoyed it. This, combined with our travel experience from last year’s trip, gave us the confidence to… linger a bit on the way back. After visiting friends and family between LA and San Diego, we took a couple of days off by ourselves in Huntington Beach to just soak up a bit more SoCal vibe and savor some quiet time on the coast before turning around and starting the return trek across the country. It would start to snow at home in less than a month.
Continue reading “Home”
We’d really wanted to see Death Valley National Park on this trip – that was right up at the top of our list of reasons for undertaking this repeat visit across the country. Once again, due to the government shutdown we didn’t quite know what to expect, and up-to-date information was hard to find. However, given our recent experience at Joshua Tree, and considering that from Bakersfield we were less than 3 hours from the park, we headed over to check it out. And once again, we were pleasantly surprised! The Death Valley Natural History Association is a non-profit that supports all of the goals of DVNP. They are funding park staff salaries during the shutdown, and the park was nearly fully open! And most of the closures were due to planned improvements or repairs to flood-damaged roads, unrelated to the current budget issues. Our heartfelt thanks to the DVNHA and all of the staff we met in the visitor center and campground for enabling us to have an amazing visit in Death Valley
Continue reading “Death Valley National Park”