Slash pine ridges along the saw grass prairie of the Shark River Slough
Although we were glad to help my mom through her first-ever experience with surgery (at age 91!), we had to defer the latter 2/3rds of our planned southwest adventure. By the time my mom was stable (which happened very quickly, given the possibilities), there was no longer enough time to get back to any of those southwest plans. But we didn’t really need to rush home. Could we find a different adventure? What if we had planned a trip to the southeast… Is there something we would explore in Florida that we haven’t yet visited on our many family visits to Melbourne? This was a no-brainer – Everglades National Park!
The Kouichibouguac National Park was designated in 1969 to preserve and protect a unique piece of New Brunswick’s Coastal Plain Ecosystem. The park has barrier islands that change with the tide and the wind, short sand dunes that are equally dynamic, lagoons, estuaries, salt marshes and tidal rivers that host aquatic and sea bird populations, ancient bogs and fields, and forests regenerating from past timber harvests. Its name is hard to spell, and pronouncing it is difficult enough that we needed coaching – fortunately, this was available from the helpful park staff.
The Bonavista Peninsula contains some of the oldest settlements on the island of Newfoundland. Though definitive proof has been elusive, Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto (aka John Cabot, while he was sailing for the king of England) is reported to have landed at Cape Bonavista in 1497, claiming this part of the New World for his sponsor. (Fortunately, we have better records of our own travels, and definitive proof of our visit in 2023 will also be presented here, though we’re claiming nothing.)
At the southeastern corner of the island of Newfoundland, St John’s is the largest city in Newfoundland and Labrador. At this moment, about 530,000 people live in NL, and 212,000 of them (40%) live in the St John’s metro area. [By contrast, just 26,650 (5%) live in all of Labrador, though Labrador accounts for 72% of the land area of the province.] Anyway, statistics aside, we were eagerly anticipating our visit to the urban St John’s for several things we would find there: music, history, hiking, sightseeing… and a Sprinter service center.
Tadoussac was the site of the first Canadian trading post along the St Lawrence in 1599. Its location where the Saguenay River and fjord meets the St Lawrence River made it an ideal trading site between the European and indigenous people of the region. The location is also beautiful! Current-day Tadoussac, home to fewer than 1000 people along with scores of whales, has become a popular destination for tourists (many in search of a glimpse of said whales) and second homeowners from the more southern parts of Quebec. It was also the site of the 37th annual, 4-day Festival de la chanson de Tadoussac (Tadoussac Song Festival).
Mon arrière-grand-père Achille Fréchette a amené sa femme et ses 9 enfants de Tingwick, au Québec, dans le nord du New Hampshire pendant la dépression car il n’y avait pas d’emplois dans l’est du Canada, tandis que les usines du New Hampshire avaient des emplois et embauchaient. Alors que mon grand-père Félix et tous ses frères et sœurs sauf un sont restés en Nouvelle-Angleterre, son frère Orad est revenu au Québec et s’est installé dans la ville de Chicoutimi. Pendant mon enfance, j’ai souvent entendu mon grand-père et mon père parler d’Orad, que je n’ai jamais rencontré, et à un moment donné, j’ai appris qu’Orad avait une fille nommée Suzanne qui était juste un peu plus âgée que moi.
We’d never been to the Outer Banks. What are these things? What’s out there? They are a chain of long, thin islands shielding the coast of North Carolina, although they’re not normal islands. They’re more like sand dunes, evolving by the minute from the wind, tides and waves, and slowly shifting the Outer Banks south and west over time. They’re long, over 100 miles (the inlets between the islands close up and form anew in different places with time and the storms), and quite narrow, from a few hundred feet to 3 miles wide, and they are low, with an average elevation of 12 feet above sea level.
Vancouver Island is about 1.5 times the size of Vermont in both area and population, with a comparable amount of geographic diversity. Remembering that we’ve chuckled about travelers planning to visit Vermont in 2 days (‘It’s so small!’), we allotted 10 days to explore Vancouver Island and found it wasn’t quite enough – there’s so much there!
The coasts, the ferries, the forests, the farms, orchards and vineyards… The small towns, the city of Victoria… The hiking, kayaking, biking, surfing… (Surfing?) The rainforest with giant cedars, Douglas firs, ferns and moss, the palm trees… (Palm trees?) Here’s more on the lower part of the island…
With a week or two left for exploring before we need to start heading toward Vermont, we decided to spend some of it on Vancouver Island. We got passage on the MV Coastal Renaissance, one of the largest double-ended ferries in the world and radically different from the 6- to 10-vehicle river ferries we boarded while in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. The height of our camper required that we board the truck deck – 6 lanes wide and seemingly a mile long, filled with trucks and other RVs. On an absolutely gorgeous day, we spent the 2-hour trip on the immense upper deck, trekking back and forth and all around as we took in the sights. From the departure dock at Horseshoe Bay, we could look back on the Sea to Sky Highway hanging off the mountain, splotchy with low clouds. Islands in all directions looked like mountains popping out of the ocean, many dotted with small communities along the shores. We looked back on the city of Vancouver, beautifully situated on the ocean, as more mountains came into sight on the horizon – Vancouver Island.
We debarked in Nanaimo, a pretty city on the east shore of the island. Without a plan, we headed north toward the most remote part of the island. Little did we know, the moon was soon to enter the seventh house, and Jupiter would align with Mars, and we were about to get a unique Vancouver Island experience…
You might be thinking by now that we have a perverse infatuation with dead-end roads to out-of-the-way places. Ok, maybe we do a little – and we’ve been to some outrageously cool end-of-the-road spots – and sometimes there’s more to it than that. While at the Folk on the Rocks Festival last year in Yellowknife, we chatted with some folks living there who came originally from Inuvik. They loved the town, and they also told us that the Mackenzie Delta was the most beautiful place on earth. That was certainly enough for us to put it on our list.
So, who’s ready to hear about another 1600-km (1000-mile) road trip on a mostly great dirt road that totally rocked? It’s actually quite different from the last one. True, Alaska’s Dalton Highway – which we drove in June – and the Yukon/Northwest Territories’ Dempster Highway both provide overland access north of the Arctic Circle. They both involve about 1600 km (1000 mi) of unpaved roads through the wilderness with spectacular wildlife, and they are both the northernmost roads in their respective countries as well as the first (Dalton) and second (Dempster) northernmost roads in North America. They’re both legendary for broken windshields, flat tires and, oh, yes, you could die. Other than that, everything was different.
