Maritimes - Summer 2008

July 5 - 25, 2008

This summer we decided to take a three week camping holiday to the Maritimes. The plan was to try and meet up with family in Fredericton as well as the 'aunt colony' in Cape Breton. Rubby had also decided that he wanted to visit Grand Manan and promised Samantha lots of beaches and walking on the ocean floor. With those being our only fixed criteria, Rubby decided to plan our route according to earthcache locations.

Earthcaches are geocaches in the sense that you are given coordinates for your gps to go find a place, but unlike regular caches, there is no 'treasure' in the traditional sense to find. Instead, earthcaches highlight some geographic or earth science feature and you have to answer some questions or take specific photos in order to be able to log the cache. Virtual geocaches are also similar except less stringent in the learning requirements. In the past we've found these types of caches can lead you to some really cool and interesting sites that often only the locals know about so our mission on this trip was to try and hunt down some of these local hidden gems. We found caves, natural spring waters, mines, fossils, and even ended up having a geocaching encounter with a local cop in Cape Breton!

As for accomodations, we camped the whole way. A lot of people probably thought we were crazy to camp for 3 weeks with a 3 year old and a 1 year old. And at times we too thought we were crazy. But we had lots of fun and given the type of summer it's been, we were really lucky with the weather... the only really rainy days we had were mostly travel days. And thanks a million to family who hosted us along the way... it was nice to have some breaks from camping meals and to let someone else watch the kids for a bit! (Samantha and Christopher would like to add that it was nice to have someone to play with other than momma and poppa!)

Select a day to view the photos (there will eventually be 21 days):

Samantha at Whitehead Island, New Brunswick

Christopher at the Salmon River in Fundy National Park, New Brunswick