Nova Scotia Turning Point

Day 38:  Why not go as far east as possible on the ‘East Coast’ trip?  Hello, Canada!  We are coming for you!  As soon as we get to Nova Scotia, we can start heading back towards MN through the Great Lakes highways (and hit the large Canadian cities).

We won't be taking the ferry to Newfoundland ($1,000+ round trip for the ride), so we will be coming back to Minnesota now! This is as far as we go east. The turning point.

• Started: Ellsworth, Maine
• Traveled U.S. Highway 1
• Crossed the Border near Upper Mills (just south) into Canada
• Welcome to New Brunswick!
• Traveled Canada Highway 1
• Hit Saint John (pee break!)
• Drove, drove, drove
• Welcome to Nava Scotia!
• Ended: Halifax, Nova Scotia

Canada is basically like driving through a National Park. It’s green with pine trees (cold now, so there aren’t any other leaves), rocky with mountain-like hills everywhere and massive boulders. The glaciers really dropped a lot of rocks here because the farm fields are just piled high with HUGE rocks. A little Bobcat isn’t going to move these monsters. Good luck plowing!

We drove through some back roads to avoid tolls and we noticed their garbage cans were wooden cylinders. Chad researched a little and found an article about the proper way to dispose of garbage while living in rural areas because of black bears. No meat scraps can go into the garbage until the day of pick-up (store everything in your freezer until then!), make sure you hide the wooden cylinder garbage can in a secure storage shed and make sure to scrub off your grill when you bbq!

Chad and I switched driving part way through the day and it felt good to drive again.  I was able to drive through some really rural, back highways with really beautiful mountain/hills.  In the winter, it looks like the roads are shut down and the snowmobiles take over the road (no ditch riding here!  What a privilege).  I guess the snow gets pretty deep around here?? 

We stopped at a bookstore! (Didn't see anything of interest this time!)

First stop when we got to Halifax was to fuel up at Costco. We arrived and discovered they don’t have fuel at this location (no worries, there is a gas station around the corner), so we went in to load up on water. Bummer, they don’t have large gallon waters and it was expensive for bottle water. Premium item, eh?

We found a few things and went to purchase our items with the Visa (travel card!) and they don’t take Visa. Say what? U.S. is contracted with Visa while Canada is contracted with Mastercard. Oh. Alright. We paid in U.S. cash and they had to remember how to convert the currency. Yikes! Sorry to hold up the line, folks!

Yay, we gained our first Canadian currency of the trip! But, in an embarrassing manner.

A little flustered from the currency exchange, we tried the gas station with the Visa.  It took a couple tries at the pump, but I figured it out and we were able to purchase gas.  Phew.  Call home: “Ya, mom?  We won’t be coming home because we ran out of gas in Canada.  So, we have to find work until we can fill up the tank lol.”

Not wanting to be caught by surprise by a toll bridge, we researched the route we needed to go to get to their downtown and found a toll. Perfect. Alright! Katie: manned with the new Canadian currency coins and $5 bill. Chad: driving during the end of rush hour.

There were only a few lanes open for cash and we just happened to pull into the ONLY one that didn’t have an employee working at the booth. In the shuffle to get the coins, we bumped into eachother in the car and one of the coins fell between the seats! WE needed a $1 to cross and I only had 3 quarters…..that could have been the 4^th quarter we needed and now it’d been eaten by the seats!

We didn’t have a dollar and needed to make change, so we tried to back up but there was already a 3-car line up behind us. Sweating. We are slightly panicked, mostly embarrassed. Stupid Americans lol. The toll guy in the next booth had to get out, cross a lane and come to our booth…then walk back to his booth, make change and put the money in the slot for us….so embarrassing. Thanks.

We tried to drive forward, but the road infront of us had red ‘X’ above two of the three lanes. The cars were coming right at us! Or, so we thought. There was only one green lane available and we started forward. It was the weirdest bridge we have ever been on. They can change the lane access based on the time of day to accommodate traffic (hense the reason for the X’s telling us which lanes we could drive in.

Coming off the intense cortisol hit from the toll bridge, we struggled a little finding parking and ended in a parking garage (Impark - $6 for the night). We went downtown to try a seafood chowder and poutine!

First, we tried Salty’s seafood chowder. Before we ordered dinner, we had the waiter charge our card to make sure we would be able to pay for the meal. We did not want to be left high and dry again! It worked and we tried their chowder. It was tasty, but not as good as the one we had out in Seattle near their Pike’s Market Place. Their cornbread was awesome, though.

Yes, sing it. "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, CAAAAAAAAANNNADAAAAA"

Next, we walked up the streets to find the poutine place. We were down in their historic downtown and the old buildings were lit up and they had art everywhere. Music was blaring from their bars (live acoustic!) and there weren’t that many people out at 9 p.m. (time shift again! Two hours a head of Minnesota).

Willy’s poutine was a surprise. It was good! The cheese curds were yummy, the gravy flavorful and the pulled pork was smoked. YUM. A medium order was MASSIVE and we walked to a bench to eat it (window service only). We listened to a band and people watched. We actually filled up and didn’t hit the other food places we had intended to go to that night.

Chad researched while I drove during the day and found a location for sleeping: Wal-Mart. There is a section where all of the campers park near Home Depot and it was right. There was about 5-6 and a semi resting when we got there.

Chad spotted a black blob with four legs walking around the parking lot and laughed. “What if that’s a little black bear??”

Huh!!!??? That’s not good! But, it’s shape transformed and we noticed it looked more like a solid black wolf wandering around the parking lot! The wolf-dog went and curled up on the grass away from us and we settled in for bed. It was supposed to get down to about 38 that night and we bundled up (I put on socks lol). It started to sprinkle rain and the black dog-blob vanished. Night Night to the wolf dog!