White picket fences…

Well, it’s not often that I say this, but Canada is all I ever thought it would be! If I was thinking about Canada I always thought about wooden, brightly painted houses, fenced off with white picket fences, standing on a huge green lot with lots of trees surrounding it. When we drove through Nova Scotia the last few weeks, it just proved me right and I loved it!

One thing you can say about Canada is that everything is easy here. Wherever you go, you have shops, National Parks, beautifully kept parking lots, public toilets and super friendly people. This last thing is something that really struck us from the very first day we arrived here. Some people may say that the Canadians are just superficially friendly, but I find that to be untrue. Whenever someone sees our van and all the stickers (or ‘decals’ as they call them here) of the countries we have been to, they come up to us to learn our story and to whish us luck on our further travels. Everywhere you come, they ask you how your day was and it just makes your day that little bit brighter, even though it is probably the shop’s policy.

We have already done some hikes with breathtaking scenery and some fun and exiting ones. Most of the time Seb is being eaten alive by mosquitoes or black flies but he bravely walks on, smacking the flies with every step he takes!

One day we did a hike to the edge of the water and the wind was so strong that we had to watch out that we didn’t go tumbling down over the edge of the cliff. On one of our walks we were even lucky enough to see a moose! It was bigger than I expected it to be and it didn’t seem to be scared of us at all!

Most days we are just relaxing and taking life as it comes. Life on the road is way slower than everyday life because even the most simple thinks take double the amount of time. Take cooking for instance, I am taking way longer here to prepare the most simple meal because I have a tiny kitchen and need to prepare some things in 3 or 4 times. As strange as it may seem though, the end result tastes way better than it will ever taste when you are at home. At home you are doing 10 things at a time, even when you are having dinner. Some times the van looks like a real hippy van, with all the clothes hanging in it to dry…

We are becoming a real tourist attraction around here with Peanut and not a day goes by that someone doesn’t stop to talk to us. One day a bus filled with elderly tourists stopped and one guy even asked us if we were being paid to do what we where doing… Other people just want to know the story behind the van and it’s colours.

We have done the Cape Breton loop, a world famous trip around the top of Nova Scotia, and Jeff, a motorcycle guy we met along the way wanted to know what we thought of it. Well, it was nice, you have some real cool view points on the western side, but the eastern side is, well, boring! The last part we did, the road was not only boring, but the surface of the road was terrible! So in the end, you are right Jeff,  it was a bit overrated but some vistas where very good though!

We have always been lucky so far to camp in a spot where we either had a nice view of the ocean, the beach or a starry sky or where we had some facilities. One day we even found a place, next to the local fire station, where we could have a shower and do some laundry. The night we spent next to the light house, we saw a group of whales, but they were too far out to take a nice picture. The feeling that you are looking at real wild whales however is something you could not capture on a picture even if you wanted to. There was one night that we wanted to stay at the parking lot of a fort we wanted to visit the next day, but near the evening, the security guy from the parking came to tell us that he would be locking up and that we couldn’t stay there. He told us that we should go to a lighthouse, a bit further down, so off we went, looking for the lighthouse. No, it was not the one I talked about earlier, because in the end we didn’t manage to find it and we ended up camping next to the beach. After a while we found out that we were very lucky to have stopped there because we were greeted by the local neighbours, a group of 3 pup foxes… They were born there and were half tame, so they came up to you, real close and you could feed them. They were so cute and fluffy and I’m glad that Seb was very firm to say NO, when I asked him if we could take one as a mascot for in Peanut…

One thing we have already learnt here is to take it easy and to enjoy what you are doing when you are doing it. Multitasking is a thing of the past here. As someone once said: “stop and smell the roses!” Well this is just what we are doing here and we are loving every bit of it!