Day 4: Clawsome Adventure - We head to New Brunswick!
Today was a travel day: from PEI to New Brunswick. Again, not a really early morning. Luggage out at 8am, departure at 9:20am.
While packing up for the transfer, I unfortunately found that the zipper on my suitcase had been damaged. I have no clue when this happened, as it had
unzipped OK when I unpacked it. It might have been the transfer from the hotel in Halifax to the motorcoach or the motorcoach to the hotel in PEI, or maybe it just spontaneous combusted after all the years of stuffing it, but when I went to zip it up this morning, I found it had separated and some of the teeth were damaged, so that I could not get it zipped up. Fortunately, I had a couple of
ABD suitcase straps, so I strapped it together and let Josh know what had happened. When the bellman came by to collect my suitcases, he knew about it and asked which suitcase it was, so that he could hand-carry it to the motorcoach, which I thought was nice. I was going to have to look into finding a replacement suitcase, as I really couldn't keep traveling this way, and I CERTAINLY could not fly home with the suitcase damaged as it was. But that would have to wait until later.
Honestly, as much as I loved PEI and my Anne of Green Gables day, I was really puzzled. Everywhere I read and all the people I talked to said how gorgeous PEI was. But unless we somehow managed to avoid the beautiful parts of PEI, I was honestly unimpressed. The areas of the coast we visited were nice enough, but nothing spectacular, and as we headed southwest across the island towards the bridge to New Brunswick, most of what we passed was farmland that looked very much like areas of Ohio farmland. And while I love Ohio, I would never describe it as gorgeous. I guess I should do some googling or something to see which areas *are* gorgeous, it just seems like that would be part of the discussions. Oh, well! (Spoiler, I found the areas we visited in New Brunswick to be FAR prettier than PEI. But maybe that's just me!)
Anyways, off we drove across PEI. As I said, our target starting out was the Confederation Bridge, an 8 mile long bridge that crosses the Northumberland Strait between PEI and New Brunswick. It took a little over 10 minutes to cross. It's the longest bridge in Canada and, according to Wikipedia, the world's longest bridge over ice-covered water. The Adventure Guides put on some adventurous-sounding music as we crossed (I'm pretty sure it was from some Disney attraction, but I couldn't tell you which).
Leaving PEI from Port Borden.
Once on the bridge, it was water as far as the eye could see.
Once we arrived in New Brunswick, we parked in a visitor's area for the Cape Jourimain Interpretation Centre, got off the motorcoach, and walked to a vantage point to get photos with the beautiful, incredibly long bridge as a background.
We were then given some free time to take more photos and explore the immediate area.
It was *windy*, and it had a bite to it, but was still enjoyable.
Next we headed off for about an hour's drive to Pointe-du-Chêne on Shediac Bay for our next activity: the Shediac Lobster Boat Experience and Lunch. We were the only ones on the Lobster boat. By the time we loaded up, it was misting pretty heavily, and it turned into a fairly steady rain while we were on the boat. Luckily, the boat was pretty enclosed, so we were fine. I think there was an area topside, but we weren't able to take advantage of that and that was fine.
The guys running the boat were pretty funny, and taught us about lobster fishing, and the lobsters themselves (they had a trap out in the water, and had some of us help pull it in, where there was (miraculously!) a lobster in it. It was actually a lobster they kept in the trap so that they could pull her in & use her for the presentation (Lisa the Lobster) but it was still pretty funny.
They had a couple of the Adventurers learn how to put the rubber bands on her claws so that they could safely handle her for the presentation.
Continued in next post.