Month: June 2016

Mom bravely drove the motorhome through the rain and narrow winding roads along the Cabot Trail to our next stop, Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia. We spend 3 nights at each side of the park. We arrived at the campground and took some more twisty roads to get to the campsite.

Once we got the campsite set up we headed out on the Cabot Trail to explore. We opted to drive north on the trail and see where it took us. We picked up our XPlorer books at the visitors center and were off.

Our first stop was on a long rocky beach. We braved the drizzling rain and went down nd skipped stones and hunted for treasures on the beach. The little storefront was just sitting on top of us making it foggy and very dreary.

We drove along and hiked park of Skyline Trail. The views were spectacular! we learned about exclosures and how they are experimenting to see what would happen if the larger animals like coyote and moose weren’t in the forest. It was cool to walk through the largest of the exclosures.

This is a larch tree. I loved it!

We saw ample moose evidence but never a moose.

Up next was our favorite trail, the Bog Trail. There are carnivorous plants all along the boardwalk in the bog. We greatly loved the pitcher plants and the sundew.

We ended the day at Lone Shieling and hiked in a mature sugar maple forest. We had a hard time doing the bark rubbing but managed it after we found an older golf pencil in Mom’s bag.

The trail was pretty and we saw several woodpeckers and a few other birds we hadn’t seen before.

There were even little tiny fish in the river.

We finished up enough activities in our books to go get our badges when we got back to the campground.

Tomorrow we go to the airport and get Dad!

Today we drive to Baddeck (pronounced BA-Deck). We arrived early so headed out to the Alexander Graham Bell Historic Site. The grounds were beautiful. Across the street there were a few people playing bagpipes wandering around. People were tossing frisbees and flying kites. It was a gorgeous day.

We took a tour called “the Measure of a Man”. We learned a lot about Bell. He was homeschooled through age 10 and then tried public school but didn’t do well. He was an accomplished pianist and found a great passion working with the deaf. He was very interested in sound. His parents thought he would never amount to anything. His two brothers died at a young age and his parents moved thinking that would make him healthier (he was showing sickness signs as well).

He invented the first telephone. He was friends with Thomas Edison and purchased the patten for the photograph from him, improved it and then sold it back for $200,000. He used that money to open a school for the deaf. We learned about finger spelling and his unique phonetic language based on tongue and breathe.

He went on to have an obsession with tetrahedrons and created some very unique flying machines like the Cygnet, Silver Bullet and the hydrofoil.

We worked on our Explorers book and learned our dog tags. I really liked laying with the “ancient telephone”. I insisted it would only work if after you dial the number you call the operator and tell them who you are calling.

I worked really hard on a kite design.

I like these tetrahedron things. I am all about symmetry!

Flying kites was simply awesome. The wind was strong and there was lots of space. Mom helped us get the kites going and gave us some pointers. Two other boys came over and begged her to help them too. She got all 4 kites up and gave little flying lessons. B and I took turns with the giant butterfly and another smaller kite.

The wind was insane! Mom said HOLD ON TIGHT! It was pulling me around it was so strong. This kite was bigger than me!

B got the kite up really high and then let me have a go with it. I helped Mom bring it back in. That was hard work. The kite kept wanting to pull out. We got it down after about 20 minutes of work.

 

 

Today we ran a few restocking errands and then returned to the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site to finish exploring. The weather was terrible compared to yesterday so we planned a day of inside activities.

At the Bell NHS we saw different models of telephones through the years. We even got to see the original phone that was used for the first transmission. The first line ever said over a telephone was “Watson, come here. I need you.” said by Bell himself. He had accidentally spilled battery acid on himself and needed Watsons help!

We saw several other inventions by Bell including hearing machines, water condensers, a iron lung like machine and a cool machine that transmitted sound using light waves.

We enjoyed seeing some of his original furniture. The owl painting is very unique and had a cool story with it. The lady that painted it was painting a portrait of Alexander Graham Bell and wouldn’t let him see it until she was done. She actually painted an owl since AGB was known as the “night owl” since he was always up until the wee hours tinkering and inventing.

We played in the discovery area for a while and build all sorts of contraptions and discovered a new game called Tut’s Tablet.

We enjoyed a rainy afternoon of downtime and laundry.

Joggins Fossil Cliff Adventure

Today we went to Joggins Fossil Cliffs. Joggins is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The site claims to have a complete fossil record of life in the Coal Age. Joggins was almost dead center in Pangea at one point and was in the tropics.

Mom had booked this months ago and we took a 4 hour beach tour with a guide. It even included lunch! Our guide was named Sally. She was really awesome! She knew a LOT about the cliffs and the carboniferous era.

The cliffs are preserved in situ. That means the fossils remain where they were found, like the mammoth site we went to last year. The land is protected so you can not take fossils, rocks of anything else.

Sir Charles Lyell and Sir William Dawson visited the site when it was a coal mine back in the 1800s. The used dynamite to expose some of the rock. Their finding s are referenced by Charles Darwin in Origin of Species! This is a picture of the area they blew up to study.

Speaking of coal mines, there is a lot of evidence of the once open mines on the cliff faces. You can see wood from the wharfs, posts from the mind chambers and even a few old entrances. Where the mine entrances were the rocks are reddish from the sulphur and iron that is leaching out now.

Anyway, back to the fossils. One of the trees that Lyell and Dawson uncovered contained, inside, fossil records of a snail and a lizard. They discovered that the reptile fossil was the first true reptile! Dawson named it Hylonomous lyelli after Mr. Lyell. It is the first record of where animals left the seas and came to land.

Our amazing guide, Sally, took us down the beach for quite a ways. We hunted fossils the entire time. Shockingly, they weren’t hard to find. At least not once we knew what to look for. Mom called me a fossil savant! I found several cool ferns and other plant material. Breighton really liked the fossils of the tree barks.

Some of the fossils we found were of lycopsid trees from the wetlands that were once Joggins.

Breighton was impressed with the arthropleura tracks in a few of the rocks. An arthopleura was a millipede from the carboniferous era.

We also found fossils of giant seed ferns, fish and even track marks of a prehistoric lizard of some sort. We found the most of the Calamites fossils. They were a bamboo-like horsetail.

Another were the Lepidodendron, or scale tree. They left very symmetrical patterns in the rocks.

Yet another were root fossils, they were all over! This is B with a very large fossil.

We were simple amazed by all the fossils. We giggles at it but thought fish poop was also quite amazing! We even saw little sharks teeth and fossilized fish (they were so tiny).

Mom liked the fossilized rain drops.

This morning we stopped by Maccan Wetlands Park to check the time posting for the tidal bore today. A tidal bore is when the river is running its normal way and the tide is coming in and creates a wave of rushing water into the river from the bay. The time said 4:40 give or take 20 minutes. We arrived at 4:10 and walked a short trail and then say at the picnic tables going over some of our treasures. I have been collecting pieces of pottery he finds on beaches.

B is collecting beach glass. He has quite a large collection at this point. He even found a small piece of blue! No red yet.

We were looking at the tide chart (and not hinging that it looked like it was hand typed and markers up) and saw it was put together by a local man named Gordon Boss. He apparently (according to the sheet) lives right near by.

As we sat waiting for the bore a gentleman walked up and starting talking to us about the bore. It was Gordon Boss! He is 88 years young, still drives, and loves to share information about the bores. He comes almost every day to see the bore. I guess I would too if I lived at a hill over looking the area it can be seen.

We saw the water slowly start to come around the bend and then push up the river. There was an area it went flat, presumably a deeper portion of the river bed.

At the highest tides not he month the tide pushed in silt all the way to where we were standing!

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This was a really neat experience that I am really glad we got to have today. We came back to the motorhome and cleaned up, cooled off and rehydrated. We opted no swimming tonight. We got journals caught up, laundry finished and the motorhome tidied for tomorrows departure towards Baddeck, NS.