A Few Days Later:

 

Two days later:

 

We are now at a cabin in Economy. Yep,  that’s the name. If I get around to it I will try to check into the origin of the name.* There’s no real town here, just a few houses, and the group of cabins where we are staying. It’s called the Four Seasons Resort, but not the one that might come to your mind.  It’s a dozen cabins on the water.

 Our origin plan had been to go to Burntcoat, which is directly across the bay from us. That is where, supposedly, the world’s highest tides are, in the Bay of Fundy.  But there were no available accommodations there, in the few places there are near the park.   It was Saturday, so that wasn’t surprising, but a little bit disappointing. We were worried we might not be able to find anything appealing aside from a motel in the nearby town of Truro. We only saw the commercial strip at the edge of town, so don’t know if the town itself might have been attractive.  And we really wanted to stay someplace where we could see the tides.  The Four Seasons showed several cabins available, but they were three or four bedroom ones. We called anyway, hoping we could talk them into a lower price, as we are only two.  And we didn’t have to even suggest it, they gave us one of the larger cabins without our asking, shutting down the two spare bedrooms and giving us the price for a one bedroom cabin. 

·    *   I did look up the derivation of the name Economy. It comes from the MicMac  kenomee, meaning place of land jutting into the sea.

 It's fairly nice, has a full kitchen and living room, even a tv  and though we hadn’t expected it, it’s nice to check in with the greater world once in a while. For some reason, they receive the Boston channels here. Guess it’s because it’s the largest closest metropolitan area.  Guess Halifax doesn’t count.  It’s pretty weird to be out here and be able to see our local channel.

We’d stopped on the way in, at a Truro supermarket, and bought provisions for dinner – salmon, broccoli, and some pretty good chocolate chocolate chip muffins.  We also got eggs for breakfast, and still have some bread from home, as well as granola and pb and j.

This afternoon we headed out back toward Truro, about 45 minutes away. We stopped on the way at the Dutch Man’s cheese shop, which carries, in addition to all the varieties of Gouda that they make there, a wide range of foods, crafts, etc, even an upstairs antique store attic.  And a petting farm for kids, which we didn’t visit. 

Our destination was one of the areas to see what’s called the tidal bore, which is a phenomenon where the ocean comes rushing in, and later out, twice a day. It’s unusual and very impressive.  We watched it start and then for about a half hour.  The young man in the visitor’s office came out a little earlier, and then announced “here it comes.”  It was about 5 pm.  It happens twice a day.

 As everywhere we’ve gone, the visitors seem to be mostly from Nova Scotia, judging from the license plates. I have seen a few from the US, and a few from other Canadian provinces, Quebec and Ontario.  And we met a family from Germany at our previous stop, the Markland, at the upper tip of Cape Breton. But I have been surprised by how the majority are somewhat local.

We have bought food to cook at our cabin tonite, and have plenty of breakfast food left, eggs and granola.  Tonite we are having an interesting looking pasta, with all kinds of herbs, like dandelio              blended in. We bought mushrooms and the tiniest brussels I have ever seen, to cook with the pasta.    

Tomorrow we head out, to the western tip of the province, a place called Cap D’or, which is also on the Bay of Fundy. There is a lighthouse there where the former keeper’s house has been turned into a b & b with four rooms.  They cook what sounds like a gourmet dinner. But when we tried to make a dinner reservation, they suggested another place about 15 minutes away, which is open Wednesday thru Sunday, and that we eat with them on Monday night. So that’s the plan. We don’t know what to expect from the place or the area, but that’s part of the fun.  Hopefully we will see some impressive tides there, too. They were extremely casual when we tried to make a reservation before we left home, didn’t even answer the phone or emails for a few days. And when we did reach them, they basically said, fine, and didn’t ask for a deposit or anything.  Should be an interesting place, in any case.

This morning, before heading out to see the tidal bore, we walked down to the beach here, and out almost as far as we could along the sand. It was almost low tide, but it kept receding all the time we were there, and at a fast pace. In the tide pools were hundreds of tiny hermit crabs, the largest perhaps the size of a thumbnail, and many much smaller, some the size of a little fingernail, some smaller still. And there were many miniscule fish swimming around too. I saw some of the crabs chase one another, and once a few that congregated together, first two, then a third and a fourth and a fifth. Guess I have to do some looking into hermit crab behavior.

And then, I saw something bizarre.  something seeming to writhe around in the sand. Coming closer, I realized it was a razor clam, the first live one I have ever seen. It slid its white body a little bit out of the shell, and squirted out some water. And then, it upended itself totally so it was upright in the sand, squirted some more water, and then sunk slowly into the sand until it was completely underneath. We looked some more, saw other things squirting and think they were razor clams already underground. And eventually we saw some others on the surface like the first one I’d seen.  I got a  short video, and Loring got a better one, which I will eventually post.

As we walked back along the sand toward the cabin, we noticed that we were walking on tiny white barnacles, and probably crunching a lot of them. They were all over the rocks and shells and sand, like tiny white sprinkles on a chocolate confection.

So even though we might not see the most spectacular tides of the Bay of Fundy, there is also value in observing the tiny life beneath your feet.

 

 On the way to Campobello, still in Nova Scotia, we stopped at the Noggins Hill Fossil site.  It’s a UNESCO cultural site.  The beach is covered in fossils at low tide. At least that’s what the guide told us. You can go out on the beach on your own, being careful of the tides that come in quickly. But to visit the museum you need to pay, and then you can go on a half hour guided tour, which we did. He was kind of funny, saying things like he hoped there were no geologists in the group. And he asked us if we knew what UNESCO stood for, which no one did. He then said he didn’t know either, when they asked him in his job interview. But they hired him anyway.  FYI it stands for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).  I did know the UN part.

I asked the guide, after he’d showed us several fossil samples he’d picked up, as well as others he had with him, how likely it was that there were fossils at our feet, if we knew how to spot them. He basically said 100%.  We couldn’t tell at all if a particular rock had fossils or not. But I believe him.

We had also visited the Geology Museum in Parrsboro a day earlier.  It was somewhat interesting. But I prefer the more local, less sophisticated ones like the minor’s museum and the UFO one!  At that museum they mentioned a rock shop that had been there for many years,  but closed around 2015. I asked if there were any still around, and she sent us across the river and up the hill to a small building with beautiful flower garden surrounding it. Both indoors and outside there were numerous specimens, on tables, in cabinets, and in drawers,  ranging from $3 to thousands.  Some were local to Novia Scotia, some from other provinces, and others from around the world. They even had larimar, which we had discovered in the Dominican Republic, the only place it is known to exist.  I bought several small Canadian samples, apatite and biotite from Ontario, and gamelite and stilbite/ from Novia Scotia, all in the  $3 -$5 range. All to be used, in theory, in future mixed media mosaics, along with the numerous other rocks I collected on the beaches along the way, none of which I can identify. I definitely got my money’s worth, $14,  just for the time I spent browsing through all the beautiful and more expensive minerals.

Parrsboro itself was a larger and somewhat more interesting town than most of the others along the coast. As we came into town I spotted a large statue, quite bizarre looking, in the middle of a small park. I went closer to look. I have to say it may have been the ugliest sculpture I have ever seen.  It was about 10 or 12 feet tall, with spindly limbs and an overdeveloped torso, all painted a dark red.  Strangest of all, its hair, which might have been horsehair, completely obliterated the creature’s face, if it even had one. I could not tell if that was intentional or not. It represents Gooslap, which is a mythical trickster creature of the MicMac and other native peoples. I don’t think Gooslap was supposed to look like that, think it’s just a bad sculpture. I found another representation elsewhere that is much more appealing.

There are a few shops, including an antique store, some brightly painted buildings, the geology museum, and a theatre with an actual ship built into the stage. It’s the former ferry Kipawo, the last ferry across the Minas basin of the Bay of Fundy, retired in the late 1900s.  There also a few b&bs in interesting old buildings, which we didn’t check out.