Wow!  What a day!  It started this morning with still needing to finish up laundry that I had mostly completed yesterday.  Since some of the younger kids had gone swimming and “surfing” in their clothes, I needed to go ahead and wash those so that we wouldn’t be hauling sopping wet clothes all over with us.  So I got up early and finished the laundry; then the Rabideaus had to work on theirs too.  Meanwhile, we were both trying to use the wifi.  Tom was trying to get Catholic Schoolhouse work accomplished, and I was trying to get some blogs finished and uploaded.  We were both not getting much of anywhere, so I quit and Tom pursued in the hopes that he could finish.

After everything was packed up, Charlie and I took Ben and our 10 ahead to Parrsboro.  We were going back to the same beach to see the high tide this morning and have breakfast.  Kathy and Tom stayed at the campground to get some work accomplished.  We had a delicious breakfast of yogurt with Canadian blueberries while watching the tide come in.  I met an older gentleman who walked the beach most every day and stopped to tell us some about the area.  After Tom and Kathy met us at the beach, we left to go to the Fundy Geological Museum that Nicholas really wanted to see.  It had bones and fossils of dinosaurs that had been found in the Bay of Fundy area, many of them right in Parrsboro.  We didn’t spend a whole lot of time here since we needed to get on the road and drive back to Maine.

Annette standing above an Arthropleura (a huge millipede)

Charlie and kids at the Fundy Geological Museum

We drove a different route out of the peninsula that we were on in Nova Scotia.  It was a very peaceful scene.  After making it back to the main highway, we stopped at a Costco for shopping and a quick lunch and bathroom break.  Although I tried not to buy so much that it wouldn’t fit in the refrigerator, I didn’t succeed.  Some of it we ate at dinner later and some just stayed in a cooler hoping for the best.  After we left Costco, the van started making some strange noises.  We had been noticing over the last day or two when we switched from reverse into drive that the transmission was shifting a little roughly, and now it sounded like it was going downhill quickly.  We finally became concerned enough that we pulled off at an exit to talk with Tom about it and decide what we needed to do.  Late on a Saturday afternoon is never a good time to have vehicle problems.  Tom thought we needed to let it cool down for a little while, so Kathy and I started making dinner.  We had pulled over onto a dirt road with a shipping container sitting in the middle of it and beside a closed storage unit.  We let the kids out to play and set up Kathy’s camp stove to cook a delicious meal of cowboy beans.  It was nice as far as a break from the road goes.  We couldn’t have found a better place to break down.

Our camper in our break-down spot.

Hanging out waiting on dinner to cook

Playing ball

The shipping container in the middle of the road

AnaClaire picked some Black-eyed Susans

Nicholas finishing up the last bit of the beans. We didn’t want any leftovers and he had already thrown his plate and fork away.

I finally get a half-way decent picture of Nicholas, but he has beans dribbling down his chin. Such is life with a 15 year old 🙂

Tom and Charlie finally decided that we just needed to try to keep going and make it across the border into the US since we were only about 30 minutes away.

We made it across the border without incident and drove straight to a WalMart to reevaluate.

Coming up to the border crossing. We never did see a “Welcome to the USA” sign.

After finding out that the campground we were supposed to be staying at the next night had availability for that night, we decided to head to that campground instead of our original destination.  It was closer than our original destination of Presque Isle, only a little over an hour away and there was a Chevrolet dealership nearby.  Again, we arrived there without incident, parked the campers in the campsites and settled in for the night, wondering how things would go over the next few days.  We were so blessed to just make it to a campground safely.  God is so good!

Blessings,

Rebecca