We also visited a chocolate factory at St. Stephen's, right on the border with Canada. The border was literally 1000 feet away! They had all you can eat chocolate samples throughout the museum...... The city was having their annual Chocolate Festival. What luck, eh?
THALAMAC
So, one day, a mother and her progeny (her two grown daughters and a granddaughter) decided to drive up and down the Northeast Coast of the USA... They started near Baltimore, Maryland, and turned around at Prince Edward Island, Canada. Read of their adventures that spanned thirteen days!
What does "THALAMAC" mean? Thelma and Louise Across Maine [later adding] and Canada. Why? Ask the mother.
Monday, August 5, 2013
Stacy: Day 12 - The Long Drive Home
We also visited a chocolate factory at St. Stephen's, right on the border with Canada. The border was literally 1000 feet away! They had all you can eat chocolate samples throughout the museum...... The city was having their annual Chocolate Festival. What luck, eh?
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Jeannie: Thoughts and Impressions
Stacy: Day 11
Poor Kim. Today was spent driving, as will tomorrow and the next day. Although, tomorrow and the next day are full days of driving back to Maryland. Tonight is our last night in Canada! It was fun.
Today, however, we drive the "Tip-To-Tip" driving tour. Our hotel is located in the heart of "Anne Country," but that's really north-central PEI. So, the tour took us along the northern roads that parallel the coast.
We stopped at a light house at each end of the island to obtain award ribbons, and at the second light house you visit, they give you a certificate to prove that you had, indeed, visited both tips of the island.
The drive took us about eight hours. PEI is quite diverse geologically-speaking. The northern tip starts out with cliff beaches and deciduous trees, which turn into rolling hills and conifers. The eastern tip still had mostly conifers, but also had more plains than hills. I think. Days have really been running together. I'm kinda glad I've been keeping this journal (even though I despise journaling) because we are all forgetting what we did just this morning!
After obtaining our certificates, we took a self-guided tour of the eastern light house, and went to the top!! It was my first time at the top of a light house. In Portland, Maine, we climbed to the top of the Observatory, but an observatory is different from a light house.
Anyway. Today we also geo-cached, any and I walked on to the Singing Sands in the rain (didn't hear it sing due to said rain), and watched a lovely sunset at yet another light house.
So long, Canada. It was fun!
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Day 10 - PEI
We crossed the neat 8-mile long Confederation Bridge (takes 12 minutes to cross it) into PEI. After lunch at the welcome center (also a small strip mall), we trapsed around the area that inspired the writing of "Anne of Green Gables." It was neat!
Mom bought Abby a cute straw had that has red pigtails attached to it. She looked adorable. :o)
Today was the most relaxing day of THALAMAC so far!
I'm going to bed, now. I was promised sleep-in time (waking up time is 8am instead of 5:30am).
Day 9 - "Watching the tide roll in..."
Tide is halway out:
That, and it's the largest difference between high and low tide in the entire world. Amazing. So, kayaking was... ok. I was in the back, in charge of steering (and it seemed like most of the rowing), with my mother in the front. I enjoyed the actual kayaking enough, but that's all I'll say about that.
Besides the fact that I'm DONE with boats for a long while. I didn't get sick kayaking... but... I'm DONE.
However, seeing the tippy-tops of the rocks, being amongst them, touching them, gliding through passage ways--things that only insects and birds can do regularly--is, in all senses of the word, awesome and indescribable. Then, halfway through the tour, the tide had already receeded 25%. It was quite noticible since we had been through that area only an hour before.
After recooperating from kayaking, we walked around the park, did some geo-caching, and ate lunch at a restaurant. Man, are the squirrels bold! No sooner than we had stood up from the table, he scampered from the forest about 30 feet away, crawled up the deck and chair, and hopped up to the table and stole a French fry from one of our plates. He gobbled it down and then scampered away. We got a kick out of that--we were standing 2 feet away, at most, for the entire encounter.
A local/worker told us that the best time to view low tide was after lunch, so we made our way back to the water. Again, words simply cannot describe the shock and awe of seeing all of that land.
We walked along the mud flats and shore. Walking on the mud flats is prohibited, even though we saw many footprints. A kid walked past us, in the mud, and he sank 3-4 inches! Suffice it to say, he had trouble catching up to his family.
We had to climb over a lot of large rocks that had been underwater when we were kayaking. If the seabed wasn't mud, it was sharp little rocks (golf-ball-sized). The soles of my beach shoes are not very thick, so the soles of my feet got kinda sore.
Now, we were walking where we had kayaked earlier that morning, and we recognizing the tops of the rock formations. Simply mind-blowing!!! And, absolutely breathtaking.
I haven't seen a whole lot of amazing geological formations [throughout the world], but I do believe this will be hard to beat. I don't know why Hopewell Rocks isn't a Wonder of the Natural World. [Maybe it is--WiFi still isn't great, so we can't fact-check like we normally do.]
After witnessing these amazing tidal events, we prettymuch took it easy: saw another light house, geo-cached, had dinner and walked a Fossil Beach at Cape Enrage.
We got to bed an hour earlier than "normal," but we didn't have to wake up at the butt-crack of dawn the next day, either.