Day 5: Saint John, NB to Rivière-du-Loup, Québec (490km)

Started off the day by going to Irving Nature Park! We checked out this beautiful beach before heading up the trail to see what other beaches were there. We didn’t realize at the time you could drive to various points in the park… we also didn’t realize the trip around the entire park’s coast was an 8km hike.

Started off strong on the Squirrel Trail!

The sky was split in two with clouds forming an almost perfect line:

From the observation deck, we saw seals hanging out! The Seal Trail did not disappoint!

Can’t pass up checking out the tide pools…

We weren’t sure what these tracks were from, we’ll need to look it up!

This boardwalk looked really nice… but we were already several hours into a hike we hadn’t intended on taking, so we skipped it.

A few minutes later, we found a random car scrapyard of several Minis. It was totally weird and out of place, but the highlight of the hike for my other half, who identified them as Minis based off the rain catch tray from the dashboard, and the air intake. Then we found this one semi folded in half…

Angry red squirrels followed us around hoping for food. This guy had a stash of sunflower seeds in here and yelled at us when we grabbed a few to feed the chickadees that were flying around and happy to land on a friendly hand offering seeds!

Here’s a map of the park – too bad we didn’t look at it before we set out, but it was an excellent hike, especially with all the time we spent sitting in the car the past several days.

Couldn’t leave without stopping at more beaches as we passed by them! It was chilly and damp with some rain, but we stayed another few hours later having fun looking along the shore.

We have a competition any time we got out beach combing… and this was the winner, even though I found some pretty great pieces. This bottle was from a broken Fellows & Co Chemist – Saint John, NB bottle! It was fun to hang out in the hotel room that night and try to figure out where it was from.

Even though we left for Québec a lot later than expected, we had a very full and very fun day – definitely worth it. We stayed in Rivière-du-Loup when we were ready to stop driving for the night. Wish we could have explored it a bit too, but we needed to get an early start for our very long 10-11 hour drive home the next day.

Day 6: Rivière-du-Loup, Québec to Home! (1020km)

We spent a solid 10-11 hours driving today. It was long, but not as bad as I expected. We got this gorgeous sunset, and made it home safely – what more could you ask for!