Rob-n-Hild, Eastward Ho!

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Yarmouth to St John (New Brunswick) 793 km. 8:42 hours. Elevation maximum 277 metres

A long day driving today, but we had places to be and things to see on the way so it was fun. We had the option of a ferry across the Bay of Fundy from Digby (about 2 hours up the coast from Yarmouth) straight into St John, but there were a couple of places we wanted to drive through and we had the time so we went with the drive. Besides, the ferry was over $240 and a tank of gas is about a quarter of that!

It wasn't a great day weather-wise, at least when we started. This mist looks a bit worse than it really is - visibility was a good 100m so driving wasn't dangerous - but it cut down on any potential scenery viewing. Since one of the places we wanted to drive through was the Annapolis Valley - one of Canada's famed beauty spots - this wasn't great, but we have also come to expect that scenery is a relative term here: As there are no mountains in this part of the country, the term "valley" is not what we are used to! To be fair, it was nice to drive through such a fertile area - with fruit trees, vines (we think), corn, potatoes, wheat/barley (can't tell those apart from the the road) and probably lots of other stuff. Hild found a reference that Berwick (the "Apple Capital of Nova Scotia" has 55 more days of sun than the average for the province and it looks like they are putting it to good use!
The video below is all of our film from the valley, joined and sped up!

We had an early lunch in Robin's - think of it like Tim Horton's. In fact, yes, it really is just like Timmie's, but with a different name! We have seen these in the small towns across Ontario and here in the Maritimes, but never had a chance to sample them before. The egg and bacon/sausage bagels were pretty good and the (steeped) tea and coffee were fine, but the doughnuts were not as good as Timmie's. We will eat here again - but maybe not if there is a Timmie's nearby!

The other reason for driving quite so far around the Bay of Fundy was to finally get to see the Bluenose II. This is the ship we had gone to Lunenburg to see last week (while we were in Halifax) and then chose to spend the four work days in Yarmouth as Hild had seen that Bluenose II was due in Yarmouth at the weekend. Since Hild had spotted that she was moored in Pictou all week (Marinetraffic.com is one of her favourite sites since we spent days following the Bella along the Quebec coast) and Pictou was only a bit out of our way (we will discuss the rather unspecific use of "bit" another time) we decided to drop in and see her there. Only when we got to were MarineTraffic had her placed, it turned out to be a dry-dock where she had been hauled up for repairs and we couldn't get into the site to visit. However, the kind security guard opened the gate for us to take pictures without having to shoot through the chain-link fence and above are our own Bluenose II piccies!

After that it was just a drive west to St John, although Hild did find a way to avoid going back on the road we had just used so it didn't look like we had driven 120k each way to take a picture of a boat from 100m away.... The weather continued to be very Scottish (if you don't like it, wait five minutes) as we drove through mist, drizzle, rain - and some sun - for the next few hours. There were some real storms around as we could see clouds looking like mushrooms (from the rain falling from them), but we didn't drive through anything too bad. However, in St John it is quite foggy - spoiling what is supposed to be a view over the Bay from our room. We have even heard fog-horns coming from somewhere...

Coming up: Working towards deadlines!

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