Day 9: Campobello Island to New River Beach Provincial Park

Back in Canada, our riding days were getting shorter. Here's our route for day 9 (July 17) as shown on Strava and note that this includes a couple of ferry trips, on which we weren't exactly pedalling.



We left Herring Cove after a breakfast primarily composed of porridge and the last of the granola Laura had baked in preparation for the trip.

Lindsay was looking for another rest day, so she drove right from the start. The rest of us rode the easy, mostly downhill 4km to catch our first ferry of the day to Deer Island. We reached the ferry dock with a half hour to spare, so we spent a while looking at jellyfish, sea cucumbers, shrimp and other invertebrates from the shore. The actual ferry ride was easy and just long enough for the operators to collect cash from the passengers.

Deer Island proved well named, with several deer crossing the road, one approaching Steve T with an air of an animal accustomed to being fed by hand, and leaping out in front of Rachel right at the bottom of a steep hill (causing her to skid, but not crash), and one freshly killed on the road minutes before we reached it. I assume that the car and driver responsible had just come off the same ferry, since it appears that there's about 1 minute of rush hour on the island every hour.

We just made the 11:30 run of the larger ferry from Deer Island to the mainland; it was loading as we arrived, but we sailed past the queue. Some people had at least another hour to wait to load their vehicles, but it seems that they can always fit bikes.

From the ferry port, we had an easy 17km ride to Saint George and lunch at the Birch Grove Restaurant. We approached the restaurant via the South Bridge, which provides a nice view of an old mill.

After lunch, we had a meandering route to New River Beach Provincial Park, mostly along route 175. It's a wide road, but on a Friday afternoon it's pretty light traffic, and everyone seemed happy enough to be pulled along at a fairly high pace. Steve F was sure to capture the time we arrived at the tent sites, much earlier than any prior day on the trip.

The beach itself is fantastic, with a very wide expanse of good sand at low tide. None of us swum for very long, since the water temperature was more than refreshing, but it was the first real beach outing we'd had as an entire group.

We had a "surf 'n turf" meal of clams (with lots of sand, hard to rinse properly quickly), steak and potatoes at the camp site, after Steve T and Derek had run back to Saint George in the van for food and drinks.

After dinner, we all spent a while working on the "Fundy Fondo Song" with Steve T and Sean on guitar.