We had another day with nice weather. We packed up the tent, left the campground, and headed for breakfast at the Wolfsville downtown Tim Hortens. The place was crowded, but good. After breakfast we continued to Grand Pré. Grand Pré is another nice village similar to Wolfsville: Neat and old houses. Once there, we visited the Grand Pre National Historic Site. We walked through the Visitor Center and an adjacent church. Both host small museums documenting the landscape and its history (mostly 1720 to 1760 history in a sense similar to what was on display in Fort St. Anne in Annapolis Royal about the French Acadian farmers and their struggles with the British Navy and British governance). The whole landscape there is also a UNESCO World Heritage site (Landscape of Grand Pré). The visitor center and the church are surrounded by nice gardens and we walked from there up to View Park and back. View Park offers a gorgeous view over the farmland with its dykes, across the Minas Basin and across the land to Blomidon Provincial Park (the hill where we camped on top).
We also visited 2 beaches (Minas Basin Viewpoint and Evangeline Beach) by driving across the dyked farmland and enjoyed the views.
Then it was time to head for Burntcoat Head Park. This was a drive through rural Nova Scotia. It took a while and then we arrived pretty much at low tide (as planned). Burntcoat is a superb municipal park (no access fee). One enters the park via a set of stairs cut into the rock to enter the shore at low tide. From there a significant portion of the coast line is accessible while some sensitive parts are closed for visitors. The Minas Basin tide is one of the largest in the world. It has carved a number of "flower pot" rocks away from the cliff that comprise the shore. At low tide, the beach is a few hundred meters wide and several km long. The flower pot rocks and the shore cliffs are made of red sand that looks spectacular. In same sense it is similar to Hopewell Rocks in the Bay of Fundy that we visited 1.5 weeks earlier, but longer, wider and less crowded. While there were a lot of people too, they dispersed easily. We probably spent between 1 and 2 hours there and walked a decent amount along the beach that was open for visitors.
Then it was time to drive to New Brunswick. Initially the road from Burntcoat to Truro went again through very rural (and scenic) places to Truro. But we had no time to visit the various "Tidal Viewing Points" mentioned via various traffic signs. From Truro we mostly used highways to cover some distance. We did a minor detour in Moncton to fill up the gas at the local Costco and then headed north towards Shediac, Bouctouche and Kouchibouguac. At some point it became clear that we had to make a choice between visiting Shediac or Bouctouche and we made a decision for Bouctouche and passed Shediac by staying on the highway (for a while we considered driving through the downtown, but then decided that that was not an option). We arrived in Bouctouche in time for dinner. Margaret had picked La Sagouine restaurant. It was very good and affordable. So good, that we decided to have another dinner the next night (coming all the way back to Bouctouche from Kochubouguac). Margaret ordered a lobster roll and I ordered seafood pasta with a salad. We also had dessert. All very good and affordable. The place was well visited.
Afterwards we headed for the last stretch on the highway to Kouchibouguac National Park. We arrived there very late. But the reception was still open and we were able to get a campground for 2 nights. We found the tent site and built the tent during darkness using our head lights. Finding the washroom was a bit of an adventure. The map given at check in showed a path way that did not exist where penciled in. Margaret found it. However I ended up with a bit of bush-whacking and ultimately also found the trail to the washroom.
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