Nova Scotia 2007
Day 15: Saturday June 30
Copyright(c) 2007, Jim Beachy
It’s 7:30 AM and I’m putting in my contact lenses when my cell phone vibrates. It’s Peter Shearer, of Peter and Wanda, the legendary New Brunswick greeting team who meet and greet any WOTI member who travels remotely near or through New Brunswick. We’ve been exchanging e-mails throughout the trip and are trying to finesse our schedule for tomorrow, when we expect to be passing through the Moncton area of New Brunswick. We agree to a meeting place for 9:00 AM tomorrow morning from which we can ride to breakfast. He also offers an alternative for my headlamp problem, offering to pick up a bulb from his dealer so I can install it when I get to his area. I tell him I’ll call him back, as I want to try the local dealer her first.
“There are quite a few things to do in the North Cape area,” he says, and suggests several interesting things we could do. “But I think you and Kitty don’t do many tourist things. You seem to be more the type that ride to the end of the road to see the last lighthouse.”
That would be us. Yesterday at breakfast the waitress thought it just had to be that we would go to Charlottetown, the largest city on Prince Edward Island. “We came here to see your country, not your city!” I finally said.
So back-country roads it is for Kitty and me. No snakes, no cities, no traffic. Kitty’s Kardinal Rules for a trip. But first, a stop by DBL Dream Machines, the only Honda dealer listed in the Gold Book for the entire island, to see if the headlight bulbs arrived in yesterday’s shipment. They didn’t. I decide to ride home with just one low-beam headlight. The last time I tried to remove the garnish on my Wing to replace a headlight bulb, I needed an impact screwdriver to loosen those pesky screws underneath the rubber mirror molding, and I don’t want to mess with it on this trip.
Off, then, to see the western side of the island. Rain threatens and a few drops splatter on the windshield but we see patches of blue where we’re going (Kitty says her mother used to say “enough to make a shirt”) and ride off without doing the Dance of the Rainsuit. We catch Rt. 11 out of Summerside, then Rt. 12 north and west, wandering slowly among the fields and bays of the area. As yesterday, we see numerous mussel farms in the estuaries and rivers. I’ll need to do more research on this, but apparently mussels are grown in “socks” that extend down into the water and are marked by a buoy that places their location. We see many waterways dotted in neat rows like the dots of a game of “box” that I used to play as a kid. (Remember that game? There are a bunch of dots in rows and columns, and one player connects two dots, then the next player connects two dots, and this continues until you can make a box, at which time your turn continues as long as your pencil stroke creates another box. The game ends when all the dots are connected, and the person who has made the most boxes wins.)
Off, then, to see the western side of the island. Rain threatens and a few drops splatter on the windshield but we see patches of blue where we’re going (Kitty says her mother used to say “enough to make a shirt”) and ride off without doing the Dance of the Rainsuit. We catch Rt. 11 out of Summerside, then Rt. 12 north and west, wandering slowly among the fields and bays of the area. As yesterday, we see numerous mussel farms in the estuaries and rivers. I’ll need to do more research on this, but apparently mussels are grown in “socks” that extend down into the water and are marked by a buoy that places their location. We see many waterways dotted in neat rows like the dots of a game of “box” that I used to play as a kid. (Remember that game? There are a bunch of dots in rows and columns, and one player connects two dots, then the next player connects two dots, and this continues until you can make a box, at which time your turn continues as long as your pencil stroke creates another box. The game ends when all the dots are connected, and the person who has made the most boxes wins.)
This is a bittersweet day in many respects. It’s the last day of lobster season on the island, and we see many lobster fishermen hauling out their traps in the little harbors we pass. Other lobster boats are motoring in from open water laden with lobster traps. It looks like very hard work. I wonder if they find it a bittersweet day. They are probably glad their 3-AM mornings are done for the year, but so is their lobster-fishing income.
For us, it’s bittersweet because it’s the last day of scenic touring before we head for home in earnest tomorrow morning. We’ve missed our family and friends at home, and we are getting pretty desperate to see our granddaughter Danica, but we love these times together and it’s always a bit melancholy when we make the last turn and know that after this we’re headed “home.”
Running through large potato fields interspersed with spring-green fields of crops, we hit light rain that just wets the road. The worst kind of rain for a clean-bike freak like myself. Nevertheless, it’s a lovely ride to North Cape, the extreme north and western point of the island.
Running through large potato fields interspersed with spring-green fields of crops, we hit light rain that just wets the road. The worst kind of rain for a clean-bike freak like myself. Nevertheless, it’s a lovely ride to North Cape, the extreme north and western point of the island.
Located here is a large windmill farm for generating electricity. We’d seen these at several places in Nova Scotia as well as the eastern part of Prince Edward Island. Their huge graceful propellers turn slowly in the constant wind in a synchronized dance that is strangely mesmerizing. “Atlantic Wind Test Site”, reads a sign. If you want to test wind, this would absolutely seem to be the right place for it. We receive our Point-to-Point certificate that 
documents our visit to both the East Point and the North Cape lighthouses. I check my GPS to see if this is the farthest north we have ever been. It is not. The north end of Cape Breton Island, the point where the road from Capstick to Meat Cove turns to dirt, beats us by about 3 degrees of latitude. 
As we leave North Cape and catch Rt. 14 for the ride southward along the extreme western coast, we can see dark rain clouds inland. “That’s where we’ll be heading soon,” I tell Kitty. “I’ll give us a half hour before the first rain.” A while later, she says “Here are the first rain drops. I timed it. It’s 15 minutes.”“Well, I meant serious raindrops,” I reply. We do the Dance of the Rainsuit before any more raindrops hit, then negotiate whether I should get credit for my estimate. She finally agrees that she’ll give me credit for getting it right. We run through a number of rain cells, but each one strikes only a glancing blow and we have no hard rain. It’s interesting, in this area where flat land meets the sea, to see six or eight different rain cells scattered around the horizon.
Kitty and I talk about whether we want to stop for the night on the island as planned, or ride on into New Brunswick. She thinks she’d rather ride this evening and get a head start on tomorrow. “It’s the going-home syndrome,” I say in the headset. She echoes with a German expression my dad uses that translates roughly, “Ok, we’ve had our time, now let’s go home with a vengeance.”
I have enjoyed Prince Edward Island. We have pretty much ridden all its coastal roads, ducked into dozens of its picturesque harbors, and ridden a few of its interior routes as well. I’m a little sad to be leaving the fine red soil, lush green fields, and the sparkling blue waterways of the Gentle Island. We have tried to leave gentle footprints, to represent our country well and to respect people who are proud of theirs. We have obeyed the speed limits and left generous tips to those who have gladly served us. We have found the people to be exceedingly friendly, as in all the Maritime Provinces we have visited over the years.
I have enjoyed Prince Edward Island. We have pretty much ridden all its coastal roads, ducked into dozens of its picturesque harbors, and ridden a few of its interior routes as well. I’m a little sad to be leaving the fine red soil, lush green fields, and the sparkling blue waterways of the Gentle Island. We have tried to leave gentle footprints, to represent our country well and to respect people who are proud of theirs. We have obeyed the speed limits and left generous tips to those who have gladly served us. We have found the people to be exceedingly friendly, as in all the Maritime Provinces we have visited over the years.
When I stop the bike to make sure we have the correct Canadian cash available for the bridge crossing, I realize that I’ve taken along a good portion of that fine red soil in the form of dirt that has collected on my bike and trailer while navigating those red roads in the rain. It’s a filthy mess, quite possibly setting a historic record for the amount of dirt and grit on the finish.
The fare for motorcycles to cross the Confederation Bridge outbound from the island is $16.25. There’s no extra fee for the extra trailer axles as is the case on most toll roads and bridges I’ve traveled, where my fees are often the same as a three-axle truck. You can pay by credit card but we haven’t done our homework so we pay with Canadian cash. We make our way across the 11-km bridge and call Peter Shearer from the visitor center on the New Brunswick side. We agree to meet for dinner instead of breakfast, so we make our way to Moncton on the four-lane Trans-Canada Highway and find a room at Exit 450.
Peter and Wanda come to the motel in their car to pick us up for dinner, and so we meet for the first time in person after exchanging e-mails and WOTI posts for years. It’s great to put faces to the names we know. At dinner, we talk about diets and United Baptist churches and motorcycle rides and bilingual New Brunswick and lobster fishing and why politicians can’t combine three towns into one. Peter gently corrects an error or two, such as my reference to Nova Scotia as an island, and I’m sure there are other errors in my stories.
After dinner, Kitty and I decide to wash the bike and trailer at the car wash Peter had pointed out, so after they drop us off at the motel, we ride several clicks to the car wash. I have a technique where I soap up the bike (never using the high-pressure trigger for the finish except on the wheels), then follow up with a soapy cloth while constantly bathing the finish with the low-pressure soap spray. I then follow with a low pressure rinse. Back at the hotel, Kitty helps dry the bike and trailer. Now, I would never impose on her my idiosyncrasies about having a clean bike, and I never ask her to help me with the bike, but it’s a lot faster and a lot more fun when she does, and I appreciate it.
And one last note: I’ve finally figured out why sometimes I can post messages via my normal e-mail client and sometimes not: If the hotel’s Internet access requires authentication or “click to agree,” then my ISP accepts that IP address. Otherwise, not, and I’m forced to post text using a web browser, which adds undesirable formatting characters to the WOTI messages.
We have a nice head start for our ride homeward. We’re an hour and a half closer than I expected, having ridden 427 km (265 miles) today without realizing it. Tomorrow we have to go through US customs but that is somewhat offset by the fact that when we hit Maine, we regain the hour we lost on The CAT when we changed time zones coming into Nova Scotia. And I know that Kitty hears Danica calling her heart home, and I can tell the call is getting louder. Might it be possible that Kitty will become a 1000-miles-a-day woman on this homeward journey? Might I become a man with a 1000-mile wife?
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