The thirteenth luminous thing...

...Canada!

Mom and I are spending a few weeks in Atlantic Canada—New Brunswick and Nova Scotia—so the blog is going to be mainly photos from the trip. I was driving today, so not a lot of photo time...still, this will at least get you in the right frame of mind.

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Mom and I flew from Washington, DC, to Bangor, Maine, rented a car and drove to Canada. It's gorgeous weather—in the 80s in Bangor but breezy and not humid, all sunshine and blue skies. Lilacs are blooming, lupines and purple wildflowers waving on the roadside, and there seem to be marshes and bogs and odd wet-place vegetation every few miles. Towns are only a few houses, there are fewer cars. Great exposed metallic-looking boulders and seams of craggy fractured rock run alongside the road, pine trees grow along the tops of them in what must be only a few inches of soil. Fields are dotted with piles of boulders like some kind of neolithic stone monuments.

The border crossing was easy--a short bridge, a short line of cars, and Adam, the smiling Canadian border crossing guy who wanted to know if we had any exotic fruit.

5.26.12 Calais, Maine/Canada

 Then the highway to the northeast—more pine trees, distant hills, sweeping vistas, marshes, "attention moose"signs, and glimpses of the Bay of Fundy. We practiced our french (sortie, barrage, converges). We calculated km into mi in our heads and lost an hour crossing into the Atlantic time zone. We stopped for fish and chips and clam and chips—fresh and really really good and exactly what we needed--and then on north.

Clams and chips at Comeau's 5.26.12

 


In St. John the fog came in or, rather, we drove into it and the view closed in. The Bay was just next to us and all we could see was a gray wall of damp. The temperature fell from 82 to 57. The air coming in smelled of mist and seaweed. On the other side of town we swept back into the sunlight.

Another two hours of pines and green fields and deer and maybe a badger and then Moncton, New Brunswick—our first night in Canada. A soft pink sunset, green all around, a chilly evening. Tomorrow, on to Nova Scotia!

Sunset behind Hampton Inn, Moncton, NB 5.26.12