Living Water

We just spent a glorious 3 weeks on vacation together. It's been a while since M has been able to take time off when we are traveling. I think our 2022 bike trip was the last time he was really off from work for a continuous stretch. Our destination was the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia, mainly because we have friends there and the provincial park was available and familiar territory as a place to stay. We really made no plans in advance, other than booking an unserviced camping spot. This meant that we had to carefully ration water and electricity as all water had to be hauled in (or as it were, OUT) of the camper and the electricity came from the sun. Mostly we swam in lakes and went to the beach, read books, played cards and built a puzzle. 

It was so quiet at night. Even though many people were staying at this campground, the sites are spread out and sort of separated from each other by dense shrubby forest, so you can't really see anyone else, and people are extremely respectful of quiet hours. We could hear loons and foxes at night. The porcupines in the park were huge! I've actually never seen a live porcupine outside of a zoo and it was funny to come across one waddling through the brush, eating grass and berries. There were a few foxes living near the park and many, many signs warning us not to feed the wildlife. The foxes were not very skittish, sometimes coming right up to your car, so I'm guessing some people have been feeding them. One of the foxes had a very unique coat compared to most red foxes I've seen....this one had brown and black and even some white mixed in with the red. 

One question that came up during the many hours of driving (1,200 miles aka 2,000 km each way!)  was "Why does it feel good to look far?" And you can look far in many directions, across a lake or out to the horizon from the beach. 

The coast in Nova Scotia breathes, drawing wind off the ocean at certain predictable times of the day. The tide in the Bay of Fundy is extreme, dropping 20 or more feet, exposing viscous red mud. When it refills the rivers, it rises as a visible wave moving upstream that people actually ride in small boats for fun. 

I've been swimming almost every day this whole summer, at home it was in a pool, but in Nova Scotia it was what you call wild swimming. Lakes and oceans. The lake we camped at is connected to the ocean, so has a little salinity. This keeps the leeches down, but there are some eels living in it. Now that all my children are pretty competent swimmers, lake swimming is much more fun and relaxing. Our friends have a floating dock in their part of the lake, so you can swim out to it and dive off. One day we all went to the beach and took a surfing lesson, which I was, frankly, terrified to try, but it turned out to be very fun, and felt much less dangerous than I expected. This was partially due to some favorable wave conditions on the day I went. M and Laurel and Marko went back a few days later and the surf was much more challenging. 

Since we didn't have water hookups in our trailer and there were only two showers for the whole campground, I was glad to be in the water so much. We had some debates about whether a lake swim counts as bathing. Certainly ocean swimming and surfing in a rented wetsuit calls for some scrubbing, at least to get the sand out. We noticed that there was a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo sitting near the dock where our friends live, so clearly some consider the lake to be an adequate bathing setting. 

One thing we didn't do was have a campfire. Ironically despite being surrounded by water, the conditions are extremely dry and the fire bans were in full effect, even closing the forest trails to all recreational traffic with a $25,000 fine. Hopefully they will get some rain soon.

While Canadians were universally polite and respectful to us, the news coverage and topics of conversation were often centered around the Trump administration's policies. For the first time I saw widespread pro-Canada flags and signs, and while there was nothing anti-American per se, there was lots of talk of admonishing Americans to do something, as well as a general sense of betrayal.