Today was not what we had planned, it ended at home. We awoke relatively early enjoyed breakfast in the van, tidied up and set out.
Big Axe Brewery parkup
Our first stop was just a few minutes down the road at the park in Nackawic where we saw a very Big Axe!
Nackawic’s Big Axe
Returning to the Trans Canada Highway we head North towards the Québec border. It’s Sunday morning and the traffic is almost nonexistent as we wind our way along the shore of the St John River. The highway offers some lovely views of the river valley.
Crossing into Québec we also return to Eastern Daylight Time gaining an hour back. This leads me to conclude that we would be arriving at Drummondville before 2:00pm. As Drummondville is only about 3hrs from home, I put it to Barb that we could skip one last night of camping in the van and drive straight home and sleep in our own bed. Decision made! Home we go.
Traffic along the St Lawrence South shore is busy and gets busier the closer we get to Montréal, but we only get stopped a few times and make good headway. As we have done before, we take Autoroute 30 across the south side of Montréal towards Salaberry-de-Valleyfield and then North across the St Lawrence River to Autoroute 20 where we head West towards Ontario.
We stop in Cornwall, ON for our last gasoline fill up and then head to the Long Sault Parkway to use the publicly accessible RV dump station where we empty our tanks one last time.
45min later we drive into our laneway, tired but happy to be home. 11hrs of driving and we have a pizza waiting for us thanks to our daughter.
End of trip odometer
In all, 28 days to cover 8,184km. The total drive time being just shy of 112 hours and the campervan now has almost 75,000km of exploration completed. Where will we go next?
11:43pm, Jul 3rd and our ferry, the MV Highlanders, pulls out of Port aux Basques, NL. The 7hr crossing begins.
We have reserved seating for this crossing and so are looking forward to hopefully more comfortable seating than we had a month ago. Yeah! The seats are more comfortable. They recline like the non reserved seats but also have a flip-up support for your legs and a small padded stool on which to rest your feet. In all these features should allow for a better nights sleep.
Ahem….. I said ‘should’. Neither Barb or I had a very good nights sleep. These chairs are just not suitable for us. In all I think we each only had about 3hrs of sleep. The remainder was spent trying to get comfortable or walking about the vessel to pass the time. Argh.
North Sydney morning sky
We arrived in North Sydney, NS at 7:00am and we were one of the first vehicles allowed to depart. We headed out of town on the TCH towards Antigonish; however, before arriving there we stopped in a small roadside park where we each slept for an hour and a half.
After catching up on a little sleep we drove to the Masstown market where Barb did some shopping while I slept a little more. We enjoyed fish & chips for lunch and returned to the TCH heading westward.
The weather is very different than we’ve become used to over the past month. We left Newfoundland in foggy and damp conditions with a temperature of about 15°C. Today on New Brunswick we are driving in beautiful sunshine with a temperature of 31°C. The vans air conditioning system is working wonderfully.
We stop at Nackawic, NB where we are staying at the Big Axe Brewery, a Harvest Hosts site. We enjoy a plate of Nachos and a beer each, and Tony buys a couple of cans to take home as well as a souvenir glass.
This was the second time we had camped at https://campingpointerdl.ca/en/ and would highly recommend the campground for anyone passing through this area. The sites are clean and mostly level with decent hookups. The service buildings are brand new and thus well lit and clean. The showers are individual, spotless and rate a 10/10 (not exaggerating).
Our route out of town took us through the historical downtown of Rivière-de-loop before depositing us back onto the Trans-Canada Highway heading towards New Brunswick where we would spend a few hours heading South.
We stopped near Hartland, NB to visit the Covered Bridge Potato Chips location forgetting that it had burned to the ground in 2024. They have opened a temporary store in a trailer. Upon discovering this, Barb exclaimed “I was expecting it to be bigger!”
A few shots in and around Covered Bridge Store
We parked and went in to look around and ended up purchasing 4 bags of chips (crisps) in various flavors (as one does) before returning to the van where we enjoyed a grilled smoked meat sandwich accompanied by cheddar cheese chips. Mmmm.
2 more hours of highway driven and we stop for gas near Gagetown, NB. The middle of nowhere as I could not see any community nearby to support the business, but here it was busy and thriving.
Another stint of highway driving and we cross into Nova Scotia where we stopped at Masstown, NS for Fish & Chips.
Haddock & Chips. Yummy!
Last driving leg today saw us drive to New Glasgow, NS where we have parked up for the night at the Atlantic Superstore (after confirming with store staff that this would be OK).
This ends our 2-day sprint to Canada’s East Coast. From here things will slow down considerably as we take our time exploring and sightseeing. Tomorrow we are heading to Cape Breton.
It wasn’t supposed to be a long day but it turned out to be the longest of this trip. Here’s how it all came to be.
The day started with us enjoying a slow start to the day. We had a light breakfast and then went to the beach expecting to see the tide in but it was out again exposing a long stretch of beautiful beach sand. The pictures below are taken 15min apart and show the influx of elementary school children on the beach enjoying what we assume was an end-of-school outing.
New River Beach Provincial Park, NB
We left the campground at 10:30am and headed West towards St. Stephen where we turned North towards Fredericton. The pictures below show some of the backwoods beauty of this province.
After joining Hwy 2 and driving North for a few minutes, we decided to leave the highway and drive along the side of the Saint John River on the old highway. This led us to seeing a black bear cub as he climbed over the guardrail towards the road in front of us. Yikes! 😳 Brake hard, he sees us & returns to the safety of the trees. Phew. No pictures as it was all over in a second. We stopped in Meductic and ate lunch in the van overlooking the river.
Saint John River
Shortly after lunch we stopped in Hartland to look at the worlds longest covered wooden bridge. It was closed for construction and as no traffic was able to cross it gave me an excellent chance to view the inside of the bridge by standing in the roadway.
Hartland Covered Bridge, Hartland, NB
Just North of Hartland we passed a more modern crossing of the river and then we rejoined Hwy 2 towards Edmundston, NB.
Saint John River crossing, Perth-Andover, NB
We pulled into the Grey Rock Casino in Edmundston at about 3:30pm. We were supposed to end our day here and camp out in the parking lot for the night but decided that it was too early to stop and so just picked up a cup of coffee and rejoined the highway.
Our initial thought was to return to the campground in Rivière-du-Loup; however, as it was only 90min North and we were going to cross back into Eastern time, we would arrive at 4:00pm EDT so we looked towards Levis and found a Craft brewery near St. Pascal that welcomes campers. New destination entered into the GPS.
It was a short while later that I realized that rather than stop just to sleep and then continue, why not simply continue? Home was only 7hrs away. We stopped in Levis for fuel and then continued to Drummondville where we stopped at a rest stop and had a quick meal in the van. Still feeling awake and energetic, we continued onwards towards Montreal where we left autoroute 20 and joined autoroute 30 which would take us around the south shore of Montreal. Below are a few picture of the sunset that we saw shortly before Montreal.
By the time we get around Montreal and cross the St. Lawrence River we were just 90min from home. We turned West onto autoroute 20 towards Cornwall, ON. After Cornwall we continued to Hwy31 where we turned North towards Winchester. At this point we were almost home and would arrive by 11:30pm. It turned out to be a 12 hour day with time taken out for stops and eating. In all I figured we drove for about 10 hours in which time we left the Bay of Fundy and returned to Eastern Ontario. A distance of about 1100km.
This concludes our East Coast Tour for this year. We have places we want to go back to as well as places yet to visit, as such we will make the drive again, when? We’re not sure yet, maybe a year or so.
