Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Aug. 31st, 2024, Day 4 East Coast - Fundy National Park


TODO: Add all the pictures.

The breakfast at the Pinecone motel in Sussex was good. It had a personal note, while serving the usual items (the lady served us fresh fried eggs and the scones and similar were good). The motel, while a bit aged, is well maintained by a couple. The lawn is spotless. It is a reasonable place to stay.

The weather was again very good today.

We continued via a short drive to Fundy National Park. We bought a 1-year Parks Canada pass. Post buying the pass, I was told by my daughter that if I bought the pass a day later, it would have been valid for all of Sept. 2025 (which might have been interesting for me/us). Anyway, this is water under the bridge. We checked in at the Headquarter campground near Alma and set up the tents.

Afterwards we did the Dickson Falls loop. This loop did not exist 30 years ago and it is very very beautiful. Some sort of natural Japanese garden. The walk is mostly a boardwalk that runs along a brook in a deep ravine. The sides of the ravine are covered by moss, stones, and a few young trees. The higher up canopy is formed by pine trees. The water of the brook and the waterfalls were crystal clear. The walk is a little gem and about 1 to 1.5km long.

Afterwards we drove to Herring's cove and had our breakfast/lunch there. We walked down to the beach and from there quite a bit up and down to the Matthew's Head lookout. I believe Gongyu and I did the same walk with Gongyu 30 plus years ago. This time the walk remainded me at the forest portion of the West Coast Trail. Steep sections up and then down. Lots of tree roots in the way (but everything was dry here). I managed to hook my shoes twice into tree roots and have a slow-motion fall to my hands and knees (nothing serious, I did not have a 20kg plus backpack pushing me down). The views from the 2 lookout were nice. We returned the same way to the parking lot.

Our last trip of the day was at the Alma beach. The tide was approaching its low at about 6pm.We (my daughters and me) walked about 400m out on wet sand and enjoyed the scenery. There is plenty of beach and despite lots of people doing the same thing, the beach did not feel overcrowded at all.

We had dinner back at the campground (tortellini with tomato sauce).

And then we headed out for a star-gazing event at Herring's Cove organized by a local astronomy club. The event started at about 8:30pm with a slide presentation explaining what we were about to see. And then it was time to visit the various telescope observation stations. It was a gorgeous dark night. Even with plain eye-sight ton's of stars were visible. I saw the ring of Saturn through one telescope. And a few star clusters through some others. The astronomy folks also had a few strong "light sabers" to point out various and star constellations and give a general idea of which area of the sky we were looking too via the instruments. It was a cool ending to the nice day.

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