After our visit to Hopewell Rocks for photos at high tide, we drove north on patched and pot-holed roads up the coast and into Moncton, stopping for fuel and groceries. Diesel is the same price as regular gas and expensive - between $1.07 and $1.13 per liter (about $3.42 per gallon US). Then along the northwestern coast of New Brunswick province, Acadian territory. The Acadians were the French that were forcibly removed and relocated to Louisiana (remember the poem Evangeline we read in high school?) although some were relocated to various US East Coast ports by the British. Their flag is the French red, white, and blue vertical stripes with a star in the upper left corner (second from left). Many signs are only in French.
We took the Confederation Bridge - 8 miles long across the Northumberland Strait from New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island (PEI) where we could see the long ridge of the cloud bank with sun over the western part of the island. We headed straight for the sun! We stopped at a visitor center to pick up lots of tourist literature as we were not sure we would get up here this quickly and I had not prepared our visit here in any detail.
PEI is known for its red soil and fields of potatoes. Farmers were busy plowing and planting their potato crops.
We decided to tour the coastline of the western end of PEI and tried to get a reservation for a Segway tour of Summerside, the second largest town on PEI. Unfortunately, they would not be opening for the season for a couple of weeks. Bummer.
Driving through Summerside, we noticed odd street lights that had square red stop lights, triangular yellow lights and round green lights. We finally figured out these odd shaped lights were only on horizontally mounted street lights and we think it is so that color-blind folks can tell which light is green, yellow or red!
We passed a beautiful church right on the water on our way to the The Bottle House.
I thought The Bottle House might be a tourist trap, but it wasn't and we spent a wonderful hour exploring the bottle houses and gardens. An Acadian lighthouse keeper retired and began to build a tiny house made of bottles of all colors and shapes cemented together in wonderful patterns. He eventually made an 6 gabled tiny house (12,000 bottles), a tavern and a chapel (10,000 bottles).
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| The Altar |
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| Pews made mostly of votives |
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| Beer Bottle Cross |
Breathtaking. His daughter runs the place and we had a nice chat about her Dad who passed before he could finish the final pew in the chapel. My Dad would have loved to have seen this - he was a magician with cement. When I was a child, he made me a playhouse (7' tall ceilings) all out of concrete, including the roof with a built-in pool (1' deep) in my playhouse backyard.
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| Six-gabled tiny house - front |
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| Interior wall of 6-gabled house |
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| Scrapbook about the owner and his hobby |
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| Replica of the lighthouse where he served as lightkeeper |
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| Back of 6-gabled house |
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| The "Tavern" with some of his favorite bottled displayed |
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| Closeup of bottle and cement construction |
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| The Bottle (made of bottles) Entrance |
We continued our drive up the coast and then inland to Mill River Provincial Park that has a campground and a golf course. Unfortunately, the Province sold the resort to a private corporation and the campground was not open yet. As we looked over other campground possibilities in the parking lot, a woman pulled up and asked if we needed assistance and suggested possible places to stay. She finally said, "If you get stuck, I live right around the corner and you can stay there and plug in." Wow - how nice is that???? We did find a place to stay 25 minutes north that turned out to be spectacular. A large grassy spot overlooking the Northumberland Strait and provided us a gorgeous sunset.
We met the only other campers here, a nice couple from North Carolina. We chatted for quite a while and it looks like we have similar thoughts about touring the Island and expect to see them again.
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