Campsites – The Destinators

Saint-Siméon-de-Bonaventure, QC

Nous étions garés sur un grand parking presque vide de la plage de Brackley, dans le parc national de l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard, en train de préparer nos vélos pour visiter les sentiers dans le parc, lorsqu’un autre camping-car, identique au nôtre mais un peu plus récent et beaucoup plus rutilant, s’est garé quelques places plus loin. Nous avons vu un couple commencer à préparer leurs vélos. Bien sûr, nous n’avons pas le choix – il fallait leur dire bonjour…

English version follows, or click here.

South central PEI

As we drove across the beautiful and brilliantly engineered 8-mile-long Confederation Bridge between PEI and the mainland, we were entering PEI with a few time constraints – tickets to a show on 8/8, meetup with friends on 8/14 and don’t visit PEI National Park with its legendary crowds on a weekend – and a list of things we wanted to visit. Oh, and we had forgotten about the Canadian long weekend and so arrived just in time for that. Working up a schedule with all these constraints required a bit of creativity. (Check out PEI on our travel page in you’re interested in just how much creativity…)

There was was only 1 item on our list in the south central part of PEI. However, given our driving routes to work around the constraints we got to explore this area and found a few gems.

The east side of PEI

By PEI standards (I wish to stress that this is an important qualifier here), the east side of the island was quiet, laid back, and less touristy. It was also geologically different – again, by PEI standards – hillier, more trees, fewer huge flat farms. According to locals (and backed up by the Potato Museum), we learned that the soil on the west side of the island is perfect for large-scale agriculture, while on the east side… not so much. There are farms, to be sure, however the east is also home to some forestry and a few sawmills. As on the west side, there are lovely red beaches and cliffs along the shore, and lots of lighthouses, along with the agriculture and fish processing.

PEI’s west coast

From the north coast we set off to explore the west coast of PEI. The drive was quite pretty as we passed miles of tidy, colorful potato, corn and wheat fields. Relatively flat with rich red soil, it seems every bit of land that is not used for a house, a church or a music venue is used for agriculture. Taking back roads as much as possible, we also passed through bunches of tiny towns, a handful of big ones, and more of the red coastline’s alternating cliffs and beaches.

Stan Rogers Folk Festival: Stanfest 2026

A young folk artist whose musicianship and songwriting skills had gained widespread recognition across Canada by the early 1980s, Stan Rogers was well known and celebrated for his traditional-sounding songs of Atlantic Canada, the Great Lakes and the prairies. Returning home from a festival in Texas in 1983, Stan lost his life in an airplane fire at the age of 33.

About a dozen years later a group of folks got together in Canso, a small and remote fishing town on the south coast of Nova Scotia, where they put on a folk music festival to honor Stan and his music. Fans came, the festival was successful, and it has become an annual event which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

The rest of Cape Breton, part 1 – Isle Madame and Saint Peter’s

After landing in Sydney, NS from Newfoundland in 2023, we visited the northwestern section of Cape Breton that features Cape Breton National Park and the Cabot trail. While there, we visited most of the attractions and hike just about every trail. That’s only about half of Cape Breton. Here’s the other half…

The Edge of Fundy, part 1 – Minas Basin

We noticed a large clump of e-pushpins surrounding the easternmost portion of the Bay of Fundy. Ha! We noticed two themes… about half of the places are related to the Bay of Fundy’s extraordinary tides, and the other half deal with the significant history of Acadians before and after Le Grand Dérangement/ Deportation of 1755. I think we can visit them all! Shall we? Allons-y!

The North Coast of Western Nova Scotia

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.

Saint John, NB

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.

Lubec, ME and Superlatives

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.