Start of the Canadian Maritimes Adventure

It’s summer, and that means it is time for us to escape the heat of New Mexico and head north. This summer’s adventure will be to the Canadian Maritimes on the east coast of Canada.

When people realize that we often traverse the country, they usually ask “How long does it take you?” We have done Las Cruces to Rochester, New York in 3.5 days, but that is NOT recommended. This cross-country drive took us four weeks. We had a few sights to see!

We left Las Cruces about a month later than we had wanted to. We had some “stuff” to take care of. But one fine June morning, we hit the road!

Our route took us to Denver for a nephew’s wedding celebration, then over to Kansas when I realized that Homestead National Historical Park was along the way. This park had been on our bucket list for a while.

Just north of the Homestead National Historical Park is Lincoln, Nebraska. And what’s there? The International Quilt Museum! As an avid quilter, you know I could not resist.

After Kansas, we found a campground in Missouri right on the Mississippi River (Illinois is across the river). James thoroughly enjoyed watching the tugs and barges.

The next stop was in Indiana to visit my niece Laura and her husband Greg. They are expecting their first child, so I had made them a steampunk themed baby quilt. If you know Laura and Greg, you understand!

The next stop was Cuyahoga Valley National Park south of Cleveland, Ohio. We have driven by this park so many times over the years, it was time to finally pay it a visit. This National Park is unusual in that it is in the middle of a metropolitan area. Its creation was part of a “Parks to the People” effort.

We then FINALLY made it back to Rochester, New York where we lived for 40 years. It was the week of the July 4th holiday, when campgrounds are FULL of vacationers. So we opted to sit still for the week. The week was full of visiting our daughter Callie and meeting up with lots of friends. Huge apologies to those in Rochester that we didn’t get to see. The week flew by and everyday was busy, busy, busy.

Are we to the Maritimes yet? No, we had one more stop. Portland, Maine is where our other daughter Janelle lives. We had another full week helping Janelle around her new house and getting ready for crossing into Canada.

Rookie Mistake

Yesterday…it was time to enter Canada, specifically, St. Stephen, New Brunswick. By the way, this also puts us in the Atlantic time zone (1 hour ahead of Eastern Time).

We are not novices when it comes to crossing into Canada in an RV. We have done it multiple times. But we got a little complacent yesterday. The border crossing didn’t go as planned. Rookie mistakes were made by us. We got googled…meaning we trusted Google maps when we should not have.

The little towns of Calais, Maine and St. Stephen, NB don’t have just one crossing point. They have three. Google took us to the crossing in town that really didn’t want to accommodate our over-sized RV. Our RV is 13′ 4″ tall (13′ 6″ is the maximum legal height). Not only are we tall, our RV has a long wheel base and can’t turn sharp corners. We should have gone to the newest crossing outside of town. Oops.

Yes, we were too tall to fit under the second of two canopies at the crossing and the RV couldn’t navigate the turns without unhooking the truck from the RV. This is not the first time this has happened to us. We had a similar experience crossing back into the USA over in Montana in 2014. Being a little smarter after the Montana experience, I ended up grabbing my passport and using the pedestrian walkway to enter the Canadian Border Control office to explain our dilemma.

Canadian Border Control was very nice as we figured out what to do. The Border Guard asked me how long it would take to unhook the truck. “Two minutes” was my reply. And that is about what it took. We unhooked the truck while at the booth and diverted to a side lane without a canopy. Phew…crisis averted.

I said Canadian Border Control was nice….well, mostly nice. We had 11 bottles of wine in the rig, purchases from our Harvest Host stays at wineries (free camping in exchange for buying what the place is selling). The wine has been accumulating and we just haven’t gotten around to drinking it. We are allowed 2 bottles per person to bring into Canada, so we were 7 bottles over our legal limit. We could give up the wine or pay $50 in duties. We paid the duty and kept our wine.

But we are now in Canada!!!!!

So, that is what we have spent the past four weeks doing. Tomorrow the real adventure begins, we are going to make our way to the other end of the Bay of Fundy, home of the largest tides in the world. More to come!