Atlantic Provinces

Rolande and I recently traveled to the Atlantic Provinces, where we spent 13 days sightseeing, visiting friends and family and of course, taking the occasional photograph. Today, I’ll share a small few of the many pictures I took along the way.

We began our travels in Newfoundland, including a trip to the small town of Twillingate, about four hours north of St. John’s. We were accompanied by my brother, Bruce and his wife, Joan in quest of what proved to be elusive icebergs. Twillingate is a fishing village (quite quaint I might add) but now better known as a tourist destination. It’s one of the better places to view icebergs in the spring as well as humpback and blue whales. Despite being there in prime iceberg season, our timing was not fortunate and there were no icebergs to be found that day.

Back in the St. John’s area, we visited another pretty fishing village, Petty Harbour. I had been there last year, so my choices of pictures to share were more limited. I chose this interestingly named fishing boat which I like for the light reflections off the water onto its hull.

Our next stop was Prince Edward Island where we visited Rolande’s brother, Bertin and his wife, Cheryl. Bert was kind enough to transport me to some good photo locations, in this case Covehead Harbour where I captured these early evening, heavenly beams.

As we left the island, I took this picture of the bridge we had just traversed, across the Northumberland Strait to New Brunswick. The Confederation Bridge was completed in 1997 at a cost of about $840 million. Prior to that time, the only way across the strait was by ferry. Today, roughly 4,000 vehicles cross the bridge daily, a distance of 12.9 km (8 miles). The height of the navigation span is 60 m (~200 ft) plenty of room for ships to pass beneath.

One of the places we visited in New Brunswick was a St. Martins, a fishing village and tourist haven on the Bay of Fundy. I was pleased to return, having participated in a photography workshop there in 2012. It’s very scenic and not surprisingly it attracts photographers. This scene recurs twice daily as the tide recedes leaving these fishing boats high and dry. The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world, and those enormous tides alone make the Bay of Fundy one of the world’s greatest natural wonders. Twice everyday the bay fills and empties of a billion tonnes of water during each tide cycle—that’s more than the flow of all the world’s freshwater rivers combined.

We wrapped up our holiday with a little downtime in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s largest city.  Not a quaint fishing village, it’s one of Canada’s major seaports. This photograph captures two harbour pilot vessels, awaiting their next customers.

We’re always a little disappointed to leave behind this beautiful part of Canada, but after nearly two weeks we were ready for home.