Priscilla meets even more really lovely people

So Priscilla sent a few more details about yesterday.

Total distance covered: 94.06 miles

Total ride time: 8:39:43

Average speed: 10.99 mph

Maximum speed: 33.9 mph

And more about the yard in which she camped: after biking for ages and butt-numbing ages (she didn't complain or seem to see a problem with this-- that negativity is my own added slant), she decided to carry on to the town (I think) of Bible Hill, and specifically a street called Mulberry Terrace on the far side of the town so as to get a head start today.

When she actually reached Mulberry Terrace, it was growing dark and Priscilla was growing tired (ya think?!?), so she made up her mind to stop at the first house she found with a light on, knock on the door, and ask permission to camp in the yard and maybe use the bathroom. So she found a light, she stopped, she knocked...

Meanwhile, inside the very same house, the MacDonald/Comeau family was merrily going about their business (which, on this Thursday night, consisted of baths for the children, Nicholas and Lilly), when there was a knock at the door. Colin, their dad, went to the door and who should he find standing on the porch, but our very own Priscilla Driscoll! She explained her situation, and he invited her inside. Mary, their mom, sat Priscilla down to supper, put her dirty clothes in the wash, and lent her their internet connection.

Nicholas and Lilly were pretty excited about their unexpected visitor, and from her tent this morning Priscilla heard a small voice saying he wanted to see her again. She crawled out of the tent and looked up to find two little faces peering down from the window. As you can imagine, Priscilla felt very welcome and set out a little late but very cheerily for Pictou and Caribou and the ferry to Prince Edward Island.

Now, Priscilla doesn't have a GPS, and she doesn't wear a watch much, but she had checked the ferry schedule before leaving, and has some excerpts from a road atlas to find her way there, plus that famous gut instinct. So she had a general idea of which way to go, and she set out. Up some flat terrain, down some flat terrain, up some more flat terrain... it was fairly quiet for a long time. A smidge dull even, as the road was actually rather flat in the usual sense of the word, and stick straight, and the friendly trees were all back a ways from the shoulder, and so it was just the road alone for miles. And then, out of the blue, swarms of cars materialized What was this? A road rally? A funeral procession gone seriouly amok? Rush hour? Before Priscilla had a chance to find out, she was confronted with a dilemma. The road diverged, and it was really hard to tell which one was less traveled. There were signs, though, one indicating the way for pedestrians and one for vehicles. Priscilla looked at the signs, looked at Woodrow, and sighed. Such a tough little bike definitely qualifies as a vehicle. So she took off along the vehicle route, the flock of cars now lost in the distance ahead. She passed a little guard station or something, the guy sitting there waved her along, and soon she rode from the end of the road onto the ferry itself. It waited a minute for one last car (full of dawdlers, probably), and then set out for Prince Edward Island.


And it was free! But only in that direction. Why is that the case? It's not that hard to figure out, really. Obviously the current is very strong in that area, and flows in a Prince Edward Island-erly direction, so the ferryboat just floats on over and doesn't need a crew or fuel or anything. On the way back, however it must fight the current all the way to Nova Scotia, and you pay through the nose.


And guess what? Whales were sighted from the ferry en route (albeit not by Priscilla)! Just like in a National Geographic special or something... Priscilla did eventually sight land-- Prince Edward Island, to be exact, and you can sight it too if you scroll back up to the top of this post.


Upon arrival on PEI, Priscilla biked some more, this time on roads that are purported to be even flatter than those in Nova Scotia (yet she also pedaled up the steepest incline she's ever encountered... it's all very fishy). And she arrived in some town and began looking for a place to camp.


She saw a house that looked like a likely candidate, but noticed a car with Massachusetts plates in the driveway and changed her mind. So she crossed the road to knock on the door of a house over there, but no one answered. By this time the lady in the first house had noticed Priscilla traipsing around outside, so she came to the door and asked if everything was alright. Priscilla said that it was, and asked for permission to camp in the yard and use the restroom. The lady went in, checked with her husband, and then returned and invited Priscilla into the house. She and her husband showed Priscilla where to find a bathroom with a shower and brought her an egg salad sandwich, cranberry juice, and cake. A little later Priscilla was out in the yard, scouting out a campsite, when she was told not to worry about camping, and shown to a bedroom. She is probably asleep there right now, and should be waking bright and well-rested tomorrow morning, ready to explore PEI at last.

Nova Scotia = Flat

There's our pal with Gary & Janet Ness, her hosts for the past two nights, and a swell Nova Scotian couple if ever I've heard of one. Thank you dear Nesses for taking care of Priscilla!

This morning Priscilla saddled up her trusty steed and set off across the complete and utter flatness that is the hills of Nova Scotia. "It's all flat" all the locals told her, "Nova Scotia is nothing but flat roads and flat land and flat acres and hectares and square miles of flat." That was very sweet of them to warn her about those flat roads, and also quite refreshing to see such unanimity, the whole province uniting with one fierce cry ("It's flat, we tell you, perfectly flat!"), and yet...

Unbeknownst to them, and to Priscilla's vague dismay, there seems to have been a gentle earthquake while she was tying her shoes, and when she had finished and climbed onto her bike she found roads that went either clearly up or obviously down but were never remotely flat along 60 straight miles plus 2 hours more worth of miles. And those miles probably were more like twisty curvy miles, come to think of it. Flat. Pshaw. Well, maybe they meant flat as opposed to, say ribbed, like corduroy, or all cratery and pocked, like the moon (or the streets of Chicago). But in that case wouldn't "smooth" have got the idea across a little better? Or maybe today is one of those Canadian holidays we see referenced in tiny print in calendars, without really knowing what they're about, and this particular one is something like Opposite Day, or Pretend the Roads Are Flat Day, or Michael Flatley's The Spirit of Riverdance Day.

Naturally, after gliding along those lazy flat roads, Priscilla was pretty tired by the end of the day. She set up camp a little beyond Truro and is probably sound asleep now, dreaming of who knows what-- you can never tell with dreams, really. And lying quietly (one hopes) nearby is Woodrow. What? Whaddya mean, who is this Woodrow character? Why, only the silent-yet-indispensible companion for the entire trip, the Watson to Priscilla's Sherlock-- her bike! You didn't know her bike is called Woodrow?! Hmph. Well, I did. Oh yeah, I've known that for whole hours now. Yep, Priscilla and Woodrow, on the road to still more delightful adventures. Or they will be tomorrow at any rate.

9000 words and then some...

Priscilla spent today in Acadia. Above are the photos she took; below are excerpts from a couple of emails she sent. And a few links are at the bottom.

Here are some pictures of stuff that I saw today. In some of these, I'm sitting on the dikes. It's so great to see the work the Acadians did here. They built up the dikes and waited for the rain to wash the salt from the earth, leaving the soil super fertile. After riding on the dikes for a while, I ended up on a small country dirt road. As I biked around there, everything looked and smelled like Roynac, so strange. Then I finally came up on Grand Pre. There I first saw the church. It is a newer version of the chapel that once stood around there. Grand Pre is supposedly the home of Evangeline and her beloved Gabriel, made famous by Longfellow's poem. They, of course, are fictitious characters, but apparently some locals believe they were real. There is a museum in Grand Pre with a beautiful statue of Evangeline.

Here I'm at the embarkation point of the deportation. The point is called Horton Landing. The British marched all of the Acadian men a couple of miles to this point to put them on dinghies. They were then taken out to the ships waiting in the Minas Bassin (in the Bay of Fundy) that would take them away from their homes, wives, mothers, and children. I had studied it a little, but to see the places was an entirely different thing. After they took all the Acadian men away ... they also deported the women over the course of a few years. The Brits quickly realized how fertile the land was and brought in the Planters from New England to continue where the Acadians had been forced to leave off.

The tide around here goes up 15 meters, so all that wet reddish looking dirt behind me in the one picture is under water during high tide. Same with the rocks I'm standing on in another picture. The cross is a monument that was put up in 1920s to commemorate the events of 1755.

Anyway, my day was super good. So glad I took the time to do this. I plan to be on my way bright and early tomorrow. Oh yeah ... I also took the time today to lube my chain and adjust my saddle. Riding today definitely more pleasant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadians

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangeline

http://www.acadian-home.org/evangeline-poem-1.html

When it wades, it pours.

So, last we knew, Priscilla was camping in a yard, right? Jennie and Kenny Wade's yard, to be exact. How about we send kind wishes to the Wades, to thank them? How about... "May you always have sunglasses when the sun is shining and an umbrella when it wades." Hmmm... sounds like we might have a little nasal congestion coming on.

Nevermind. Jennie & Kenny (mother & son) were very kind, and duly impressed by Priscilla's exciting escapades and daredevilish ways. Kenny even wondered if all Chicago girls are so audacious and brave (um, no, not so much, but some of us like to concoct audaciously bad puns-- does that count?). The Wades also had a nice dog "like a bigger (uglier) Roxanne, but totally tubby and with a weird growth on its head."

After enjoying their hospitality, Priscilla proceeded on her merry way. More precisely, she proceeded 37.37 miles of her merry route at an average speed of 12.9 miles per hour, which took (as most of you already know, having quickly calculated in your heads) two hours and 55 minutes. And that brought her to the home of the charming Ness family. They treated Priscilla to a yummy dinner (prepared over a stove that's larger than a baseball and not reliant on an old tea tin-- in the immortal word of Keanu Reeves in pretty much every movie he's ever been in, "Whoa!"), shared their internet connection, and invited her to sleep indoors in a bed!

The original plan was to go on to Truro tomorrow (say that ten times fast), but the Nesses convinced her to stay on an extra day. "Look how far you've traveled to get to Acadia!" they said, "Who knows when you'll ever come here again." And Priscilla nodded, because hey-- they're right! So the revised plan is to visit Grand Pre tomorrow, where there are old embarkation points from the Acadian deportation, and lots of farms on the dike-lands that the Acadians reclaimed from the sea. But I'm sure we'll learn more about that tomorrow.

We have a suspect...

Sarah the helpful sidekick is also a helpful sleuth, and she found what may very well be the culprit in the croc-eating caper. See for yourselves, folks!

News from another time (zone)

Priscilla woke up this morning from a peaceful night and sweet dreams, rested and raring to go. She cooked some oatmeal and brewed some tea in her tent, then went to say goodbye to Eddie and his sister, Lisa. They sent her on her merry way with cucumbers fresh from their garden (seriously, how lovely are these people?), and that was that.

On through Nova Scotia she rode, feeling almost as if she were in another time. Village after charming village, churchyard cemeteries, more villages, more cemeteries, apple trees growing along side the road, etc. She stopped to pick apples at one tree that was a little taller up close than it had looked from the road. She stretched, she reached, she hopped up and down, she lunged, she reached some more (much to the amusement of people driving by) ... and at long last grasped a branch. She pulled it down, plucked an apple off it, and was nearly pulled (by the branch) into the ditch. Close call. Later she found a friendly low-branched apple tree and stocked up (tasty apples, albeit occasionally wormy... the better to add some cheap protein, my dear!), and she also discovered that she has entered another time, or at least another time zone. Turns out she's two hours ahead of Chicago-- sneaky old Atlantic time or Greenland time or something.

Her knee has felt fine all day (yay!) and she's been zipping along at a quick clip-- up to 40.2 miles per hour, even! So fast that she reached today's goal, Bridgetown, right after lunch, and ended up biking a bit further to get a head start on tomorrow's ride. And now she's camped out in some other nice Nova Scotian's yard, probably sound asleep and dreaming about the open road.

She still forgets to stretch after riding-- I was supposed to ask y'all to pray about that yesterday too (in my defense, I did remember about her knee). So you can pray about it today, and thanks for praying for her knee!

Foxes and Crocs

Another correction: Priscilla did not sleep in an official campground last night. She had planned to, but the hilliness and windiness of Nova Scotia prevented her from riding all the way to Church Point and its charming campground. Instead, in some other random-but-lovely town, after asking advice from the friendly locals, she pitched her tent and slept on the beach. It was a wild, windy night. She awoke in the middle to the irate yelling of a man nearby who was upset with his girlfriend (the girlfriend had a quiet voice, or else was on the other end of a telephone, as Priscilla didn't hear a peep from her... of course, we're giving noisy man the benefit of the doubt in assuming his girlfriend really exists-- we can't really be sure). She awoke a little later to find that she'd camped at low tide, and the high tide mark was a little too close for full comfort (but not close enough to soak her, which is nice).

And then she awoke bright spanking early in the morning to find that some wily fox had rifled through her stuff, looking for whatever it is foxes want (I don't know from foxes). Priscilla, undaunted by the nosy beast, cooked up some breakfast and ate while various passersby stopped to make sure that she'd slept okay, offered use of the their bathrooms, invited her for tea, etc. And then she began packing up and discovered what it is that foxes do want: foxes want Crocs! This fox had taken one of hers some distance away and chewed off the strap. I find this rather ironic, don't you? You'd think a fox, of all creatures, would have better taste in shoes.

The rest of the morning was spent attempting to attend a Sunday service (which didn't work out so well), going grocery shopping, and biking the remaining ten miles to Church Point. There she charged her phone by an Acadian French school... where the lessons are in Acadian French and nearly unintelligible to speakers of French de France (like Priscilla). I forgot to ask how she knows this-- presumably school isn't in session on Sunday, even in Canada. Right?

After that-- twenty more miles to Plympton, where she's spending the night (really). A nice gentleman named Eddie allowed her to set up camp in his yard, take a shower in his bathroom, wash her clothes, etc. Eddie works with wood, and showed Priscilla how he'd completely remade the inside of his house. While touring, Priscilla noticed heaps of wine-making equipment. She asked about it and found that Eddie makes wine too (blueberry and raspberry), and so they had a fine time discussing wine-making, and he let her sample his blueberry wine (she says it's tasty). And then he invited her to borrow his computer, which she did, and that's how I got the info tonight. Thanks Eddie!

Feel free to text Priscilla if it's free for you (it's free for her to receive them), and pray for her right knee as it's a little sore.