St Stephen NB to Battery Provincial Park Cape Breton (Nova Scotia)

Battery Park campsite, 2 Mews vans

 

For Friday June 2:

Another travel day Friday. After a very nice overnight boondocking in St Stephen near their Pizza Delight shop, we had a leisurely start, about 8am ADT. That's only 7am Eastern time, as we lost an hour to Atlantic time when we crossed back into Canada.

All main roads today. A lot of the limited-access highways are fenced to help keep moose off the road. The fencing is extensive (and expensive I'd bet). Every so often there is an escape route for the inevitable moose that reaches the road. The fence designers try to make it easy for the moose to get back into the woods:

One-way entrance for moose to leave the road area

 

These are not the scenic coast-hugging highways we usually go for, but since we have a fairly long drive today, we'll stick to the thruways where we can. Low traffic volumes and good roads make this an easy drive:

Lanes are usually well-separated

When the tide is out near St John NB, the mudflats appear:

Heading towards St John, the Welcome centre that we planned to stop at is closed, apparently permanently. We've noticed this trend in other provinces too, including Ontario. A sign of tight provincial budgets:

People still park here at the former entrance

Nearing St John we noticed some strange-looking structures:

As we got closer, it became clear these were large cranes used to unload shipping containers from large ships, or to load them:

Red arrow points at a shipping container

 

The shipping containers look larger when they are sitting on the ground, all stacked up for further deployment:

Seagulls enjoying a flat roof, it must be almost like a beach for them:

Luckily the iconic Nova Scotia Welcome centre is still open. Often they have a bagpiper welcoming visitors, but it's likely too early, and the cold wind would have been ruffling the piper's kilt today. A good Scot wouldn't worry about that though:

Around the Welcome Centre there are a lot of power-generating windmills in the nearby marshlands:

Pretty straight drive, 88 km to the next turn

Some of the newer paving along here looks quite different from the usual blacktop:

Some strange place names here :)) 

FYI, Heather is our older daughter, and we live in Bayfield:

An overview of our campsite at Battery Provincial Park, with a strangely-familiar van parked next door. What a coincidence!

Well, maybe not so much of a coincidence. Cathie and Diane.

Our Bayfield Mews neighbours Diane and Gary are also heading to Newfoundland, catching the overnight ferry Saturday night. We're heading that way on the day ferry Sunday. We've travelled here separately but have kept in touch, and coordinated a stop at Battery Park. We're about 1 1/2 hrs drive from here to the ferry terminal in North Sydney.  

Cathie and I are staying here another night, heading to North Sydney tomorrow morning (Sunday). It's a cool breezy 9C/48F here today, overcast with periodic showers. A good day for us to just to stay hunkered down in our comfy van with the electric heater going.

Today's view:

 

Friday's drive: