Road Trip - New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island
Having enjoyed the coffee from the Octopuses’ Garden café yesterday morning, we headed back again for another brew. This was our last night in Fundy, and with the sun finally out and our next stop only being 3 hours drive away we decided that we should explore the local scenery. We drove up into the park to a 2km hike called Caribou Plains.
There are no longer any caribou living here, it is now a thick forest of evergreen conifers, some leafy hardwoods, and an expansive peat bog. Peat bogs are primarily made of a plant called sphagnum moss, which is exceptionally good at trapping water in its tiny leaves, like a sponge. As it grows, lower layers die but decompose very slowly due to the water saturation. The moss keeps growing and expanding, collecting more water from nearby pools by capillary action, and by retaining rain water.
This soggy, expanding mass drowns trees and traps animals who venture out onto the bog. Tannins from the dead moss acidify the water (and stain it a dark brown colour), which creates an anaerobic environment. The result of this is that organic matter is preserved exceptionally well, and many important discoveries such as Tollund Man who was dated back to the 4th century BC.
While walking through the forest we saw lots of evidence of storm damage from Hurricane Dorian. Several huge trees right next to the path had snapped and splintered spectacularly, some fallen all the way down and others supported at 45 degrees by their neighbours. We’d also seen lost of destroyed trees in and around our campground, but the park service had done a good job of cutting these down to the stump and dragging the trunks clear of the roads and walkways.
We drove from here on towards our next three-night stay at Prince Edward Island. To get to the Island, we had to drive across a 13km long bridge called Confederation Bridge. This crazy two-lane bridge was opened in 1997, and cost about $1.3 billion over 4 years to build. It’s also a toll road, but tolls are only collected on vehicles leaving the island.
We had tried to stop at a Cape Jourimain, where the bridge departs New Brunswick, as it looked like it would be a great place to get some photos of the bridge. It seems like someone had already thought of this though, and when we approached the carpark a lady stepped out of a little house and told us it’d be $5 to come and see the view. She tried to justify it with access to an interpretive centre with info about the local ecosystem, but all we really wanted was a picture, so we chose to drive on. Unfortunately on top of a bridge is probably the worse possible place to try and photograph one, so we don’t have anything spectacular to share. Driving over the bridge was a cool experience though, it's a weird feeling to be driving over the sea, several kilometres out from land.
We called in for a beer at Upstreet Craft Brewing in Charlottetown, before heading on to our KOA campground. KOA (Kampgrounds of America) is a franchised network of campgrounds all across North America, which are all very family friendly and offer similar amenities like a store, laundry, pool, playground, and Wi-Fi coverage throughout the campground. We stayed at several different KOAs during our previous road trip across the continent, so we knew what to expect. They aren’t as nice and peaceful as National Park campgrounds, often they are large grassy fields with sparse tree cover, but they’re always friendly and easy to book online. As I mentioned in a previous post, we booked this campground last minute as our original booking at Cavendish Campground in Prince Edward Island National Park was cancelled due to storm damage.