Stratford PEI to Kouchibouguac National park New Brunswick

Camped in Kouchibouguac Park

Today was a short travel day under grey skies. No real rain though, and cool all day (13-16C). After crossing the Confederation Bridge from PEI to NB (still $20 flat rate for private vehicles), we turned north as soon as we could and mostly followed the New Brunswick coastline. 

It's an old area in places

At Aboiteau Wharf we stopped for a short hike out on a boardwalk. 

This was about half of the boardwalk length

Looked like small lichens growing on the handrail

Fingers for scale

At one point we found some "scat" deposited on the boardwalk, and wondered what animal might have deposited it. It looked a bit like bear scat, especially with the berry seeds, but too small for a bear:

 

 

The deck boards on the boardwalk were 2x6 planks, each one the full width of the boardwalk. Most planks had 3 nails into each of the 5 supports under the planks. That's 15 galvanized nails for most planks, likely 3 1/2 inches long, multiplied by hundreds (I expect) of planks. That's a LOT of nails!      

 

Breakfast this morning was a piece of last night's leftover pizza (thanks Pat!) for each of us. With noon approaching we thought we should get something with seafood in it, so a couple of lobster rolls at a seafood shack in Shediac filled the bill:

We agreed we'd had better, but they were quite tasty. We split one order of side fries.

Just a few days ago gas and diesel prices took a jump in PEI. Regular gas is now about $2.05 per litre, and diesel is almost $2.60. So we waited to fill up in New Brunswick. Still pricey but less expensive than PEI right now. Here is a NB Esso pump:

When we checked in to Kouchibouguac we noticed that a mushroom expert was giving a talk Sept 17 on identifying park mushrooms. We'd sure need that, but wouldn't likely be eating any of these we found on a short walk. We couldn't identify any of them:

 

 

Cathie took a walk to the nearby harbour area, where a fleet of fishing boats is based:

A couple of cormorants in the channel

A lobster boat (I assume) returning to base with its catch

Canada Geese love the shallow water around a sand spit

Most of the interior sites in the park look like this one we're on for the night, well-gravelled, pretty level, and quite private. We got a site with electric as it's supposed to be down in the single digits C tonight, on the way to freezing: