Spinnings, and shearings, and feltings. Oh my!

Learning to spin with a drop spindle.

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Our fifth day traveling was the big excursion day which all of us had been looking forward to for weeks – day five was Whale Watch Day. As you probably know, the Bay of Fundy is the Summer home of many of the major whale species. They are attracted by the amazingly fertile waters of the Bay and spend all Summer fattening up for the long winter spent in the comparatively deserted waters of the Caribbean. After a freezing night in the Ice Shed (our new cabin) we set off bright and early in order to make the 10:30 ferry to Tiverton. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but Nova Scotia is in the Atlantic timezone which is one hour ahead of Eastern time. When booking our Whale Watch Lisa called ahead and asked about travel time from Annapolis Royal and when they recommended that we leave. The nice woman said that if we leave at 9:30 we would have no troubles making the 11:30 ferry. Lisa then translated the ferry time in her mind to our local time of 10:30 and that was what she remembered by the time the trip actually rolled around. I think you’ll see where I’m going with this. So being who we are, we left the campground at around 9, hit the ATM, and were well down the road by our recommended departure time of 9:30. Nervously watching the clock we slowly realized that there was no way we would make a 10:30 ferry. The clincher being when we made the last turn at 10:15 and saw that we had 40 more kilometers to go! The cell phone was back at the cabin and now we are set up to miss our major outing because we were late! Finally, we made it to the ferry launch and sadly saw the ferry on the other side of the channel. I hiked up to a little restaurant to make a call over to see if we could salvage the day and was politely informed that we were scheduled on the 12:30 excursion and still had a little under 2 hours to departure. Ahem, well thank you… Pictured at left is Piper and I waiting for the 11:30 ferry (first in line!!).

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Piper enjoyed the rain that fell after we returned back to the cabin after Day Three’s adventures. She ran out to the car to get our new umbrella and play in the rain, which you will notice involved her being in her nightgown.

Day four was a travel day with had us facing a 3 hour drive from Upper Economy to our campground in Annapolis Royal. We had a planned stop along the way at the Blomidon Provincial Park near Canning.

We left the snug cabin that we enjoyed for two nights and set on our way. Early on in the trip we had decided not to adopt the Atlantic Time Zone in favor of our own so things alway seemed to get rolling around 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning. Through a combination of Lisa’s sound planning and good luck we always tended to arrive at our interim destinations at lunch time and after a fast sandwhich we hit the beach.

What drew us to this particular beach was a description in one of the guide books that mentioned that semi-precious stones could be found in the rubble and ocean stone at the base of the cliffs. It was an added bonus that the park and beach were beautiful with a great view of the Basin and the surrounding cliff faces.

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We enjoyed excellent weather again on day three and set out with plans to do some serious rock-knocking. Our destination today was the Fundy Geological Museum in Parrsboro. The intention was to try and join one of the beach walks led by a geologist, but unfortunately we missed the excursion party by a couple of hours.

Instead we went through the small but nice museum dedicated the wide variety of geology found in the Fundy region, with a special emphasis on the extensive fossil deposits in the area. Near Parrsboro one of the largest fossil finds in North America was discovered in 1986. The museum has an active laboratory which is completing the painstaking work of cleaning and cataloging some of those finds. Again, we were unlucky that the lab tech was doing paperwork in the office rather than actually working on fossils. This area is also relatively unique because of the number of fossilized dinosaur tracks that have been found.

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