Category: Photography

I’ve finally finished going through the entire trip. It was great to relive memories and make a mental note of the places I’d like to visit again and spend more time.

Here’s a quick list of links to each of the posts:

East Coast Roadtrip: Day 1
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 2
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 3
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 4   part 1  •  part 2
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 5
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 6
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 7
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 8
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 9
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 10
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 11
East Coast Roadtrip: Day 12

Route: Mont-Tremblant, QC -> Toronto, ON

Mont Tremblant is so beautiful in the Fall!

So we decide to take the gondola to the top of the village. I’m afraid of heights, but I figure, how bad can it be? I was underestimating how high it was for SURE. Turns out you stand on a grate, so you can see through (not a fan) then it goes up, up and up… The “door” is not really more than a piece of metal that sort of blocks it. I was freaking out on the way up.
Me to G: “I DON’T LIKE IT. ”
G: “you don’t have a choice now, we’re in the air”
Me: ” I don’t like it”
G: “I know…”
He thought it was pretty funny. We walked around looking for a place to eat and decided on a place at the top. Being the genius I am I decided to overcome my fear, so back on we went. I knew what to expect this time so I felt better. Just finished saying so when we were in the middle, and… It stops. We were stuck for only a few minutes, but I immediately thought, “overcoming fears is overrated!”

Route: Edmundston, NB -> Mont-Tremblant, QC

Welcome to the creepiest hotel ever!

I know they didn’t intend for it to come off this way – Believe me, I asked. This is the Days Inn, Edmundston. I’m really sorry if you’re the person the created this “enchanted castle” look. I know it’s not meant to come off as creepy (or so the lady at the desk told me), but… really? No one has ever questioned it before??

Not what you want staring at your while you eat your Fruit Loops.

Needless to say, we didn’t consider a second night here, and off to Québec we go!

Route: Kouchibouguac, NB -> Edmundston, NB

There was another family in the cabin next to ours last night, so that made it feel less like a horror movie 🙂

We spend the morning on the beach again (most of the photos are in the previous post), and then planned to drive to Edmundston for the night.

As we drove, we stopped to look at these beautiful boats. (Ok, we saw a beach and tried to find a way to get to it, but the boats were really nice too.)

Route: Kouchibouguac National Park

Today we decided to explore the Park and check out the beach! (Noticing a theme here?)

These are baby eels!!! MILLIONS of them. It was SO cool to watch them from the bridge.

Pic is a bit blurry, I zoomed in as far as I could – this is one of the seals from the colony that lives on the beach. We watched them play and hunt all day, it was awesome when they came closer to shore to check us out. They stayed far enough away that neither of us was worried. We’d picked up some binoculars which made watching them a lot easier.

Hello!

More eels:

This shrimp decided to hitch a ride!

Of course we caught our fair share of hermit crabs 🙂

This is a Moon Snail, they can get HUGE.

Teeny starfish!

Moon snail… kinda gross, actually.

It took us a few hours to walk to this boat. We were so curious to see the inside… until…

SURPRISE! Naked guy. yeah, he was chatty, we were not. 

Route: Baddeck, NS -> Joggins Fossil Cliffs, NS -> Kouchibouguac, NB

Our plan for the day was to go see Uisge Ban Falls in Baddeck. We found lots of salamanders under logs and rocks, and the waterfalls were just incredible!

This looked like it was an enchanted path…

These puff ball mushrooms are filled with grey spores that a certain someone decided would be fun to “poof out”…

It was the first sunny day we’d had in a while, and was a welcome change!

We couldn’t help but stop off at Joggins Fossil cliffs again on our way back. We’d really enjoyed it the last time, and this time we were armed with bug spray. It was a long drive (4 hours) and again, getting dark by the time we made it there.

Found a couple of little friends as we explored the beach:

Discovered some pink charcoal!

And watched the sun set:

From here, we headed out to New Brunswick to the Kouchibouguac National Park. The cabins we wanted to stay in were right beside the park and they had lots of space since it was off season. There was so much space, in fact, that we were the only people there. Even the owners didn’t stay! They gave us the key to our cabin, and drove home! We unpacked the car and refused to say what we were both thinking “Don’t most horror movies start like this? Desolate cabin in the middle of nowhere…”

Route: Pleasant Bay, NS -> Meat Cove, NS -> Ingonish, NS -> Baddeck, NS

We passed by Skyline Trail yesterday on the way to Pleasant Bay because we knew there wouldn’t be enough time to get through even the short trail before dark, so that was #1 on the list for today. I’d previously been on this trail in 2006 with some friends, and knew it was a “must see” again.

The construction was really freaky to drive by, I was thankful we were on the inside! You can see the dozer perched on the edge of the road, it’s harder to see the steepness of the drop off from this angle, from the road, it’s absolutely frightening!!

Beautiful, right? What doesn’t show are the 200km/hour winds! I literally CRAWLED across the boardwalk because I was going to be blown over. It was the most intense wind I’d ever experienced. We decided it wasn’t safe to go any further and turned back to the forest. There were 3 more platforms below, but with no fencing and cliffs on either side, there would be nothing to slow me down if I got knocked over!

Back in the forest, we could take the same path back, or the long trail. I’d heard this trail was pretty rough, and it had been raining for a few days, so I was unconvinced that we should go that way, but my other half wanted to give it a shot, so off we went. Within a few minutes, we saw an ENORMOUS bull moose!

Also saw this cool shiny bug:

The rest of the hour and a half long hike ended up being uphill in the mud. We both bought rubber boots but for whatever reason wore our running shoes for the hike. The trails provided a great path for aaaaaalllllllll that rain water to flow easily, and we were both soaked from the knee down and covered in mud by the end of it. Our shoes took 2 days to dry…

From Skyline, we drove up to Meat Cove, the most Northern tip of Cape Breton. A friend of mine had recommended it highly, but it had been raining for a few days now, and we didn’t realize that most of the roads would be washed away. It was one of the most stressful drives we did, but we made it up there. It was stunning, but if I’d known that the roads would be that bad, I would have said “next time”. The rocks were so neat, huge big slaps, crumbling and jutting out from the land. It was (surprise!) raining, so we didn’t spend that much time out of the car, and started back on our journey South along the other side of Cape Breton.

En route we stopped at Black Brook Falls, which… were kind of gross looking, and didn’t smell wonderful, but we checked it off on the “waterfall” list.

We were on a beach, so we went looking for critters under rocks (of course! who doesn’t?!)

We arrived in Ingonish, and located the biggest beach we could to start poking around.

Found some neat urchins:

(boots – since our shoes were soaked, and it just made sense! We learned our lesson!)

We met a lovely woman on the beach and ended up chatting with her for an hour. She was walking her dog, and told us all about the area, her family, and all sorts of things. It was getting dark and we had planned on sleeping in Baddeck so we said our goodbyes. She said that next time we’re in town, we should come over for a cup of tea. She made sure we knew which cottage was hers – it was so sweet! She also told us the best route to take to Baddeck (including yet another Ferry!)

We arrived in Baddeck, made a few calls and found a nice motel for the night. The restaurant seemed fancy, we’d been living off Tim Horton’s for a while now and the cloth napkins were intimidating. My other half was stuck wearing his big green rubber boots since that’s all that was dry, but I pointed out the gentleman at the next table was wearing socks and flip flops. Yup, both.

Route: New Glasgow, NS -> Inverness, NS -> Pleasant Bay, NS

We slept in New Glasgow for the night, and were on the road again pretty early. We had a couple of hours worth of driving to get to Cape Breton, and were looking forward to the amazing scenery ahead of us. Despite the rain, we stopped at Inverness Beach for some beach combing for a couple of hours. Throughout the whole trip, we made sure to take the most scenic routes, even if it added on a bit of time.

We found this cool worm thing:

Yup… this is what the road looked like!!

After all the twisty roads, we finally arrive in Pleasant Bay!