Au Canada - Days 7 & 8

Thursday, July 2 - I am finally catching up.

After several days without a decent internet connection, I have finally gotten to a place where I can upload my pictures and create a blog. If possible, I will probably do 3 blogs tonight, just to catch up. We are currently in the town of Gaspe in the province of Quebec, at the Fort Ramsay campground. This blog entry will cover days 7 and 8 of our trip, which were spent traveling into the town of Sydney in Nova Scotia on Day 7, then traveling out to Prince Edward Island on Day 8.

I don't remember why, or who told me, but I was speaking to someone about taking this trip to the Maritime Provinces, and he asked me if we had ever visited the town of Sydney on Cape Breton. We were told that it was considered a small Halifax. On that information, we did make the 1 hour drive to Sydney from our campground. Prior to leaving Baddeck, we stopped in at a yarn shop so that the girls could check out the yarns. While there, Charlie and I were sitting out in the car watching the yarn shop owner's husband preparing to mow his lawn. After spending a few minutes walking around picking up sticks and twigs, he went into the shed, checked out the level of gas in the mower, and decided to fill the tank. He then stepped out of the shed, lit up a cigarette, spotted us in the car, and came over and struck up a conversation with a wise remark about husbands waiting for wives shopping. During the conversation, we asked him if there was anything we just HAD TO SEE in Sydney. He replied that he and his wife only go to Sydney to shop at the mall, so he knew nothing about the town. Great!

Eventually, the girls came out of the shop and we got underway. We took a few pictures along the way, which you will see in the album. As for the town of Sydney, we drove around the town and could find NOTHING of interest to us. We ended up at a Subway shop for lunch, then went over to the local WalMart to poke around. One depressing thing we realized when we got into Canada is that the ONLY place to purchase beer and/or wine is at the Provincial Liquor stores (much like the State Liquor stores in NH and Maine), and, they don't carry TISDALE!!! The moral to this tale is: If you ever get to travel to Cape Breton, don't go to Sydney.

On Day 8, we left Cape Breton and headed to Caribou to take the ferry over to Prince Edward Island. The trip to Caribou was pretty much routine. We arrived at the ferry terminal shortly after 11:30AM, with almost an hour to kill before the next ferry to PEI. As we took our places in line for boarding, Charlie spotted some fishing boats off the the right of the ferry dock, and asked me if we could get over to where they were. After walking the dogs, we ventured out to the docks where the fishing boats were tying up. We were anxious to see if we could purchase "lobstahs" right off the boat! One of the men on the dock told us we could probably get them for about $4.50 - 5.00/lb. We spotted a boat just tying up, so we walked over and waited for them to start unloading their catch. We asked about buying lobsters from him and he said we could. When we asked the price, his wife quoted us prices of $5.50/lb for chix, $6.00/lb for bigger ones. We bought 4 3-pounders for $66.00, bagged them up, then had to run to our coaches to get onto the ferry, as it had started boarding while we were buying our lobsters!

After driving the coaches onto the ferry, we went top-side to make the 75 minute trip across the Strait of Northumberland to PEI. See the web albums for pictures of the trip across. You'll have to wait for the next blog entry for details of the "Lobster Feast"!

Here are your links to the web albums for Days 7 & 8:

http://picasaweb.google.com/cbenoitiii/AuCanadaDay7ToSydneyAndBack?authkey=Gv1sRgCPWOwbbF_Iif9QE&feat=directlink

http://picasaweb.google.com/cbenoitiii/AuCanadaDay8TravelingToPrinceEdwardIsland?authkey=Gv1sRgCPuW0ZH5t-i-KQ&feat=directlink