The Knutson Family Adventure

August 25, 2016

  

We had planned to make a stop in Quebec City as well but we were a little bit worried that some RV parks would be starting to shut down on the East Coast before we had made it out there.  So we did a big jump and drove from Montreal out to the North-Eastern tip of New Brunswick for our next stop.  Up until this point, I had never driven the truck while the trailer was attached to it, but since Eric was needing to get in a day of work; my time had come.

Just for future reference, if anyone is driving across New Brunswick do not take highway 180 East…Eric and I switched spots so that he could drive because this was literally the worst road he or I had ever been on.  There was absolutely no shoulder and a lot of the time part of the road was missing chunks. Just the worst.

We stayed at a park called Chalets et Camping du la Point in Haut-Sheila, NB.  The kids absolutely loved it because it had a big bouncy pad and a zip line and pool.  It was absolutely packed and definitely the craziest/loudest park we have stayed at yet.  All the other parks we have stayed at have been very quiet with lots of space and room to move around.  This place was not that.  They had fireworks which were great and much better than we expected, and they also had live music/karaoke playing really loud and late into the night.  When I went to check on Haydn before I went to bed, he had his pillow and his covers jumbled up on top of his head to block out the noise so that he could sleep.

      

Since this park was right on the ocean, we spent one day just relaxing at the beach.  Looking for shells and rocks, playing in the water and building sand castles.  Eric was warning Haydn and Ada about rip tides and telling them what to do if they got caught in one, so I am pretty sure Haydn won’t be swimming in the ocean anytime soon.

      

August 23, 2016

    

On Monday the 22nd we moved to a place called Camping Auclair about 40 minutes outside of Montreal.  I needed to do a little grocery shopping so I headed into the little town where we were staying and hit up the store.  Nobody spoke a lick of English, and my French is pretty terrible so the cashier and I had a bit of hand signal communication as she was trying to describe which cart I could use to take my groceries out to the car in.  That was fun, but we figured it out and made it out with some food!

        

Eric took the day off on Tuesday so that we could go into the city and explore.  We learned from our trip to Ottawa and found a park and ride station outside of the city and just rode the bus in.  We were practicing our French while waiting for the bus to come pick us up, and trying to figure out how to ask how much the total would be and if they had a family bus pass available…luckily there was a nice young lady at the bus stop who I’m sure was trying not to laugh at our terrible french who helped us out.  The bus driver spoke English as well so it was all good.

        

We walked A LOT that day!  We saw the Notre-Dame Basilica then slowly walked our way up to the famous Schwartz’s Deli for lunch.  We had heard that there is always a wait at this place but it is definitely worth it, so when we got there and there were only a few people ahead of us waiting for seats we were very excited.  We ordered the traditional smoked meat sandwiches for everyone and the black cherry coke that our waiter recommended to go with it.  It was so good.  Haydn even said that he liked it better than pizza and Emma who normally does not like meat very much couldn’t get enough!  We went next door for some homemade ice cream and then stopped in a candy store on the way back to the bus stop where the kids each got to make a bag of mixed (very expensive) candy.  There were really cool graffiti murals all over the city and the kids had fun finding them and taking pictures of all of the really good ones.

 

August 20, 2016

Our very first stop on our adventure was to a RV park called Recreationland just outside of Ottawa.

We were planning to go into the city on Saturday to explore and I had looked up info about parking in the city.  It seemed like there were lots of places that offered free parking on Saturday and Sunday, or we thought we could find a paid parking spot.  So we hopped into our monster sized truck and drove it right downtown Ottawa…there were no parking spots big enough for our truck.

We ended up driving around for a very long time trying to find a bus station we could park at or someplace we could park for the day and not get towed.  Eventually we found a park and ride station and caught a bus into the city.  So much better!

We made it to the Parliament Building, and walked around the city.  We stopped and ate some lunch at a cute little pub then eventually made our way over to the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum.

         

By this point in the day we were exhausted so we took a bus back to our truck and headed home.  After some supper and a swim we decided to go back into the city to see the nightly light show that is displayed on the Parliament Building.  There also happened to be a firework show on the same night so we watched that first and then the light show started.  It was really amazing what they did with lights on the side of buildings.