Pumpkin Picking

There is a little farmer's market just down the street from us where the kids like to pick out pumpkins. This is our second year going there. Natalie was set on getting a "baby" pumpkin, which was nice since all the other kids wanted to get the biggest pumpkin they could. Natalie picked this little one, which was only $1. She has played with it often since we got it and broke the stem off of it. She then decided we should go buy a new stem :)

Asher, Leif, and Trevor all got the biggest pumpkin I would allow them to get. They wanted some monster pumpkins, but those would have cost way too much and would have been difficult to carve.

I talked Heidi into getting a nice medium sized one, because that is easier to carve and the cute curved stem helped sell her on it.

Trevor can barely heft this big pumpkin, but insists on being the one to carry it whenever it needs to be moved. They also talked me into a few tiny decorative pumpkins because they were so cheap, and I got a pie pumpkin which I'll probably make into pumpkin soup when the weather turns a bit colder. 

The younger kids have already had hours of enjoyment organizing the pumpkins on our front porch and playing games with them. We'll carve them in a few weeks when it gets closer to Halloween.

 

Saint John, New Brunswick

New Brunswick is absolutely gorgeous and I'm so glad we got to see it! I wouldn't mind going on a vacation there every year! I was let down by Saint John- it was bigger than I expected (not a quaint little town like many of the towns surrounding it) and many of the activities there weren't really kid friendly; however, we did find plenty of things to do in New Brunswick and I wish we would have had a few extra days once we got started.

On our way in, we stopped in a town boasting the world's longest covered bridge. The lady at the shop there gave the kids free New Brunswick flags, probably the best souvenir from the trip.

Here we are at the bridge where the Bay of Fundy meets the Saint Laurence River and makes the tides flow in opposite directions. We went back here three times in one day to see it at high tide, mid-tide, and low tide.

There was a marshy natural area overlooking the Bay of Fundy that we enjoyed walking through

Here we are back at the bridge where the bay and river meet. 

Lunch at Wendy's was quite exciting. We did eat out more than I would have liked, but we mostly ate food that I had prepared and packed before the trip or that we got from grocery stores.

This is a fort that was built by the Loyalists to fight against the Americans, but I don't think it was ever used.

This was our third visit back to the bridge where the river and bay meet- this time at low tide when whirl pools are created.

The Bay of Fundy is famous because it has the most drastic tidal change in the world. We came to this beach near low tide and were able to climb all over on rocks that are usually covered in water.

 

 

The kids found shards of broken off rocks that slightly resembled knives and enjoyed trying to sharpen them on other rocks. They spent quite a bit of time on this while I enjoyed watching them and sitting by the water.  Austin was wandering around chatting with random people- something he loves to do ;)

 

 

This is a beach in Saint Martin, a cute little town I would have loved to explore, but we passed through it pretty early in the morning when nothing was open yet. We had quite a day planned to drive down along the Bay of Fundy and it turned into a bigger adventure than we had planned, so we didn't stay for too long.

The kids were very good little travelers, despite the fact that we spent a lot of time in the car on this day. Our trip was lengthened by 2 hours when we came to a road (following the instructions on Google Maps) that said it was a dead end. The GPS in our van and Google Maps both showed it as going through and it was only a few miles, so even though it turned into a dirt road, we kept going. The road slowly got rockier with more and more puddles (thanks to a huge rain the night before), but we figured it would get better soon and kept going. Eventually, Asher, Leif and I had to get out of the car to move rocks in the road that looked like they would scrape the bottom of the car. It was fun to run ahead as Austin drove slowly behind us. Then we came to places where we couldn't move the rocks and it was really hard for Austin to go around obstacles without damaging the car. I got really nervous and things got stressful, but we didn't go back because we figured that going back through all that we'd already been through would be worse or at least the same as just going on. There was one really tricky part that I really didn't think Austin could do, but he figured it out and we eventually got to the end of the road- to find a locked gate. He told me to go knock on the door of a house to see if we could find someone to unlock the gate, but it turns out it wasn't a house, just some buildings for servicing the area (telephone lines we think) with a few cars there, but no one anywhere to be found. Austin walked the other way trying to find someone soI started feeding the kids and trying to get them comfortable when a truck drove by, so I yelled to them and luckily they stopped. They were some really nice guys that worked at the maintenance place and were happy to open the gate for us, thank heavens!

This is one of the places where we stopped for a bit while Asher and I were running along in front of the car to clear the road. Leif also helped for awhile and Heidi and Trevor got out at the end

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This is the suspension bridge that the kids liked running on- Natalie was a little scared of the shaking, but made it across fine.

At low tide, the ships are stuck until the tide comes in again, it was interesting to see these boats just sitting on land.

This is a beach where we stopped to have a picnic lunch and probably my favorite place on the trip- it was so beautiful!

We were on a cliff overlooking the Bay of Fundy and the beach, these photos were taken from the beach where Austin had climbed down.

The boys also climbed down to the beach, but I made the girls stay with me because Natalie couldn't have made it and would have had a fit if Heidi went without her.

These photos were from a place called Hopewell Rocks, where you can hike down and walk around on the ocean floor during low tide.

The boys were not impressed by all the signs saying where you couldn't go and said it would have been better without them.

Our final stop for the day and one that I really wished we would have had more time for was Prince Edward Island. I've wanted to go here ever since I read Anne of Green Gables (like almost anyone who's read it) and we thought it would be stupid not to go since we were only about an hour away, but COVID helped ruin that by adding about an hour onto our trip when we had to sit in a huge line of cars after crossing the bridge so that we could show our pass to get onto the island (we had to apply for it online earlier in the day). We didn't see nearly enough and I'm determined to go back there soon!

I took some photos from the car of the beautiful scenery, but most of them didn't turn out. The light was fading quickly, so we stopped to grab some dinner and took it to the closest beach we could find. This was at the beach/park.

Our final adventure in New Brunswick was a treetop climbing adventure for the two oldest and dad. It lasted for almost 4 hours, but they all said it felt more like one hour.

While we were waiting, the younger three and I played at the park, walked around a little lake and took some pictures. There was a restaurant at the lake and I had visions of sharing a cinnamon roll or something fun, but it wasn't very kid friendly so we didn't do it. I tried one more time to like the downtown of Saint John, but construction was everywhere, there was nowhere to park, and none of the storefronts appealed to me enough to make me want to stay any longer. So we grabbed some food at a grocery store and went back to the park where the older boys were adventuring and had a picnic lunch there.

 

 We didn't realize until the end that we were allowed to go back into the trees to watch the boys adventuring, but it was fun to watch them ziplining and climbing and having so much fun. The other kids can't wait until they are old enough to do something like this. 

 

We started our drive back home in the early afternoon, but since it was about 15 hours long (made longer because we couldn't cut across Maine), we planned to stop at a hotel somewhere. But, in the end, Austin decided he could drive straight through and the kids were being really good (listening to Harry Potter as an audiobook was extremely helpful!). We stopped in a little town in Quebec to use the restroom and stretch for a bit and Natalie was very pleased with these little pink trees that were scattered throughout a park. The other kids were more interested in the train there. The drive through Quebec was gorgeous with all the trees starting to change colors for autumn, but once it got dark, the drive was more tedious. I'm thankful that Austin did most of it and I only had to drive for about an hour while he rested. We got home at 4:45 the next morning and everyone went to sleep and slept late! We are so glad we were able to do this fun trip as a family and like I said earlier, I wouldn't mind going back to New Brunswick every year (although that is very unlikely to happen).