My First Tattoo

That is a headline that will have my friends and family reading this blog post.  Yes, I did my first tattoo.

The last day we were in Moncton, New Brunswick, Gary went golfing at the Par 3 course at the campground.  He was playing by himself and came up on a slow threesome that was, in turn, being held back by a very slow foursome in front of them.  Rather than trying to play through two groups, he accepted an offer to join the threesome.  They were from the Atlantic Provinces and upon hearing that we would be moving next to Nova Scotia, they had some travel suggestions for us.  Gary said one guy spoke with a bit of an accent and was somewhat hard to understand, but he had said that we just had to go to a Tattoo – that it was one of the grandest traditions of Nova Scotia.  We had heard of tattooing shows where many tattoo artists would gather at a convention center and perform their tattoo artistry.  It was never something we ever thought we would attend, but if it was a Nova Scotia tradition………….  Gary investigated it a bit.  The Tattoo would just happen to be running for its one and only week of the year in the city of Halifax during the time we would be camping there.  So, off we went.

It seems there are multiple definitions for “tattoo”.  In addition to the definition of “marking a person with an indelible design by inserting pigment into punctures in the skin”, there are also the definitions of “an evening drum or bugle signal recalling soldiers to their quarters” and “an entertainment consisting of music, marching, and the performance of displays and exercises by military personnel”.

My first Tattoo was the latter kind, the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo:

Halifax Nova Scotia

Tattoos are of British heritage.  The most famous Tattoo of the world is held annually in Edinburgh, Scotland.  Nova Scotia is probably the most British of the Canadian Provinces.  After all, Nova Scotia is Latin for New Scotland.  (But it only became very British after it was very French, and the British ran out all the French, but that is another story).

The Nova Scotia Tattoo is a true spectacle.  We were very fortunate to find out about it and to be able to attend.  There were performance groups from Canada, Estonia, France, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States.  The majority of the performers are military and police troupes.  But they are supplemented by a large contingent of local musicians, singers, and dancers.  And there was also a tribute to Queen Elizabeth on her diamond jubilee of service and memories of the Titanic and War of 1812.

That’s it, I experienced my first tattoo and I can’t imagine that I will ever experience any other kind.

Prince Edward Island, Canada

PEI is by far Canada’s smallest Province both in land size and population.  On the other hand, it is Canada’s most densely populated one.  We had been thinking we would take the motor home over to the island and camp for a few days.  Instead we chose to make one gigantic daytrip out of it.  In hindsight, we think we made the right decision.  There is only one way to drive to the island, the Confederation Bridge.  It is 8 miles long and it about 130 feet above the ocean over most of its length, but it does rise to 200 feet above the water in one section to facilitate shipping.  The day we went, it was raining and the wind was blowing hard.  Cross winds to the bridge were at 20 to 30 miles an hour.  Our car was repeatedly buffeted by the winds going over and  coming back.  I don’t do well at heights in the motor home, such as when crossing bridges.  With a bridge of 8 miles, single lane each way, only a modest shoulder, and with high cross winds that would really have buffeted the motor home, I would have been on the floor the whole way and even that wouldn’t have been enough.  By the way, the toll on this one topped that of the Tappan Zee bridge back in New York.  The one way toll for the Confederation Bridge was $44.25 for just the car.  If we had crossed with the motor home towing the car, the total would have been $66.  But then the bridge cost more than one billion dollars to build.

What is PEI about other than tourism?  Agriculture and aquaculture.  You don’t usually think about an island for its farming – they are often rocky and mountainous.  PEI has some hills, but it is the potato capitol of Canada.  There are fields after fields of potatoes.  The aquaculture?  It’s mussel farming.  The bays and coves of the island are full of mussel farms.  The mussels are grown in long bags suspended in the water with buoys so that the mussels don’t feed off the bottom and other critters don’t feed on the mussels.  They also raise clams and oysters, but PEI is really known for its mussels.  Shown below is a “field” of mussels marked by its buoys.  Also shown is Gary’s lunch – steamed mussels, clams, quahogs, and oysters.  I don’t know how he can eat that stuff.  And then he bought two pounds of mussels to steam back at the motor home for dinner the next day.  They cost $1.50 a pound.

We also found that http://www.roadsideamerica.com/ our online guide to offbeat tourist attractions also covers Canada.  We took in a group of three buildings made out of bottles.  Why did someone make some little buildings out of up to 10,000 bottles each?  We never did quite get the answer to that one – maybe to get into Roadsideamerica. 

We also saw the house that inspired the Anne of Green Gables series of books.  We spent a little time in Charlottetown, the capital of PEI, but the rains rolled back in and it was just too miserable to get out and see very much of it.  We headed back over the eight-mile-long bridge and back to the motor home – a day of nearly 300 miles of traveling.  It was a long day, but I still am glad we didn’t navigate the high winds blowing across that bridge in the motor home.

More Bay of Fundy

We moved on up from St John to Moncton, New Brunswick.  From there we spent another day exploring the Bay of Fundy.  We drove down to the Hopewell Rocks.  These rock formations are along the shore line of Hopewell Cape.  We arrived in the mid morning at low tide.  Then, you can walk among the rocks along the shoreline when later in the day it will be covered with the ocean.   The rocks themselves are quite unique in that they are not solid rock, but rather are sedimentary rocks and  other material that are compressed into rock formations.

After walking the sea floor, we drove on down to Fundy National Park for a few hours before returning to Hopewell for high tide.  This National Park is a preserve for Acadian forest, the forest region of the very Northeast of the United States and the Maritime Provinces of Canada.  The trees are a mix pine, fir, birch, and spruce.  We hiked to a nice waterfall,  We also stopped right outside the park at a bakery someone had recommended to us where we purchase their sticky buns.  It was a nice tasty change of pace from our seafood tour.

Back at Hopewell Rocks, we observed the area at high tide, which was about 40 feet above the level of the earlier low tide.

McLobster?

Our friends in Maine told us that at certain times of the year McDonalds in the area sell lobster rolls.  We didn’t see any sign of it during our stay and we weren’t sure they were not pulling our legs anyway.  But sure enough, up here in New Brunswick we passed by a McDonald’s and there on the sign was McLobster.  We tried one out.  Although adequate, it just didn’t compare with ones we had in Maine.

A River That Flows Upstream?

We have moved north from Maine into New Brunswick, Canada.  Our border crossing was fairly uneventful.  There were no other vehicles at the crossing throughout the short period of time we were there.  The Canadian Customs Officer could have charged us some duty based on some of the things we are carrying, but declined to do so upon hearing our story of full timing and figuring that everything was for our personal consumption and not for commerce.  Thanks!

Our first stop was at the seaport city of St John on the Bay of Fundy.  The bay is famous for the height of its tides  The bay is basically a “box canyon”.  As I have read, it seems there are three factor at work here that make for the highest tides in the world.  First, it seems that within the tidal flows of the oceans, there is a very strong flow that comes off the Indian Ocean, around the Horn of Africa, and straight up the Atlantic toward the Bay of Fundy.  The Bay itself narrows and the sea floor in the bay is v-shaped.  Finally, the push and pull of the sun and moon are particularly strong in this area.  All of these factors combine to create a tremendous swell of water into the bay that has nowhere to go but up and out wherever it can. The low to high tide change can be over 50 feet in parts of the bay.  In Saint John, we were seeing about 20 to 25 feet of tide change (compared with maybe 3 to 5 that we saw in Myrtle Beach).  But with this much tidal force, the ocean pushes in through the mouths of rivers and actually pushes the water back.  The St John River is the major river of New Brunswick, draining more territory by far than any other river in the Province.  But even with this mass of fresh water moving out to sea, the tidal forces are so great that the ocean pushes the river back upstream.

In St John, there is an area of the river where there were once waterfalls in ancient times.  Today, there are just some rapids.  At low tide the water flows through these rapids downstream and out to the ocean.  But at high tide, the water is flowing upstream creating rapids going the other way up the river.  The water wasn’t just barely flowing upstream, it was roaring upstream. The level of the river is affected as far as 80 miles upstream.   Between the high and low tides, there are slack tides during which the river is basically at a standstill.

As the sea water rolled back upstream, we saw some seals in the river.  They were cuties playing out there.

We truly felt we were watching one of the true phenomenons of nature!  And if we figure how to post a video, our report will be even more impressive.

Acadia National Park

Acadia was the second national park we have visited during our full-timing adventures (Great Smoky Mountains was the first). Unfortunately, there aren’t many national parks on the east coast, but we sure visited a spectacular one here in Maine. Acadia was the first national park east of the Mississippi. It is located mainly on Mount Desert Island where the largest city is Bar Harbor. The area was another playground of the rich and famous in the late 1800s and early 1900s, just as Newport, Rhode Island was where we visited a couple weeks ago. It was a summer playground for the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, Morgans, and Fords. But they and many others left quite the legacy as most all of the land was donated by such private individuals for the national park. John D Rockefeller, Jr. was very instrumental in prevailing on other land owners to donate for the park. And he also donated the nearly 50 miles of carriage roads of the park. He had carriage roads on his home estate near New York City and had similar ones built on Mount Desert Island, in part to try to limit the use of cars on the island. Today, cars are still prohibited on the carriage roads and they can only be used for hiking, biking, horses and cross country skiing. There are 17 granite bridges on the carriage roads and along many areas of the carriage roads there are large granite blocks along the edges.   We enjoyed two bike roads on the carriage roads, one around beautiful Eagle Lake and the other around some smaller lakes where there were beaver lodges.  We hiked several trials, one up to the top of a granite ridge where you could see how ancient glaciers had deposited boulders on top of the ridge and had traveled with such huge force that it had scored the granite rock.

The island and the park contains many granite peaks. The valleys of the park were shaped by glacial flows leaving behind huge boulders and many lakes.  The granite is so hard that even the waves of the ocean can’t break it down into sandy beaches.  There is only one small sandy beach on the islands and its sand comes from the erosion of shells.

We met up with our friends from Florida again and went to the restaurant overlooking Jordan Pond for an iconic ice cream filled popover topped with hot fudge.  We had to walk that one off on one of the carriage roads (well at least we tried).

Pollen, Pollen, Pollen

Wow, what is up this year with all the tree pollen.  Is this just an east coast thing or is everyone experiencing much higher levels of pollen this year?  It started while we still were in Florida and we have been moving north with it ever since.  I think we are stuck right in the peak season of it every time we move a bit farther north.  Why am I writing about it?  Well, we had to take a good part of two days to clean all of the yellowish green stuff off our vehicles.  Not every campground will let you wash your vehicles.  Our campground in Maine allowed it with a bit of an extra charge so we just had to get the majority of this greenish yellow stuff off the motor home especially.  We were afraid it was going to stain the awning fabrics.  When we were near Boston, we would pass this black car each day that was sitting under a bunch of trees in an individual’s lot.  It was a black car, but you could hardly tell it through the thick yellow layer of pollen.  Gary says his eyes are far more irritated than usual and I think I have some allergic reaction to it as well.  Maybe it has to do with the mild Winter, but whatever caused it, we hope it will stop falling at least before the plant pollens take over.