After over a week of travel, CareFree and I arrived in St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, ready to start the East Coast Trail.
I left home — in Maryland — ten days ago, embarking on a very long road trip to get to Canada. Rather than driving the distance nonstop, I broke up the long drive with hiking each day:
- a hike partially along the Appalachian Trail near the Delaware Water Gap;
- the Macedonia Brook Ridge Trail, near Kent, CT;
- summiting Mount Equinox, on the outskirts of Manchester, VT (which I’d planned to do while on the Long Trail, but had to skip due to being delayed by an ankle sprain;
- a loop formed from the Liberty Springs (AT), Flume Slide, and Franconia Ridge trails in the Whites, summiting Mts. Flume and Liberty;
- a loop in the Whites from the Hale Brook Trailhead, summiting Mt. Hale, and following the Lend-a-Hand Trail to Twinway (AT), Zealand Falls Hut, and the Zealand Trail;
- a loop in Echo Lake State Park (NH) summiting Cathedral Ledge and Whitehorse Ledge.
That brought me to Moncton, in New Brunswick, where I picked up CareFree, fresh off her own smaller-scale adventure: after flying from New Zealand to Vancouver, she took a train nearly the entire way across Canada.
Staying two nights an hour south of Moncton, we explored Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park on the Bay of Fundy, known for its extreme tides — while we were there, the difference between low and high tide was nearly 40 ft (12 meters), and it was quite impressive to see how quickly the tide went out (and came back in).
In two days through Nova Scotia, we took a short hike through the Whycocomagh Provincial Park, and then a (very!) short loop around Dalem Lake, eventually arriving at the Marine Atlantic ferry terminal in North Sydney.
Boarding a car ferry with my car, we embarked on a 17-hour voyage across the Cabot Strait to Argentia, on the western coast of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. Amusingly, the car parked in front of mine on the ferry was also from Maryland!
One last drive brought us to the east side of the peninsula, to St. John’s. We passed a car from Florida on the highway; they had an even longer drive than I did!
After a brief stop at the East Coast Trail Association’s office to say hi and ask a few questions we had, we stopped at a Walmart to get food for the first portion of the hike (4.5 days from the northern terminus, Topsail Beach, back to St. John’s), and made our way to the HI St. John’s City Hostel.
After taking some time to relax, repack our food, and take a little walk around town, we had dinner in the hostel’s small kitchen. One of the people we ate with had been sitting near us on the ferry! It turned out, she was also from Germany (like CareFree), and was exploring Canada on a working travel holiday while on gap year before college. She had just left a job in Banff National Park, all the other way across Canada, and worked in the same area where CareFree had worked doing much the same a long time ago!
Tomorrow, we’ll drop my car off at a storage facility, and head out to Topsail Beach, the northern terminus of the East Coast Trail!