From Cape Tormentine, NB, we ride today in an easterly direction back into Nova Scotia and to the little town of Pugwash. Pugwash is on a little port. We knew that. But other than that we had no idea about the town; it was simply a place that had an AirBnB and which was located about 100 km from Cape Tormentine.
The ride was pretty nice and the roads were very quiet. One long stretch of road had lots of moose signs and zero traffic for about an hour, but alas, no moose sightings for us. We rode quite a ways on the New Brunswick trail, a dirt/gravel path that looks to be used mostly by ATVs. But we saw no other vehicles or bikes or walkers at all.
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| Riding the New Brunswick trail |
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| Along the trail |
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| A vineyard along the way |
As you can see, we did pass a vineyard along the way. The winery was not open, so we kept moving. We had intermittent rain throughout the day, but it was fairly warm and we didn't get too wet. As we entered Pugwash we saw a lot of industrial stuff, including a huge pile of something that looked pretty industrial.
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| Entering Pugwash |
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| Industrial salt |
It turns out that the piles are salt and that a huge underground salt mine lies below the town. The people who own the place we are staying at said that the mine shafts run about 800 feet below the town and the river and the harbor, and that we shouldn't worry if at about midnight the house shakes -- it is when they do blasting. Wonderful.
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| The Thinkers Lodge |
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| Good ideas but they haven't gotten much traction |
The other thing that Pugwash has is that it is the home of the Thinker's Lodge. This was where nuclear scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain gathered in 1957 to try to figure out a way to eliminate nuclear weapons. So far as we could find out, they only met once.
The real excitement in Pugwash was our AirBnB booking. We had made the reservation, paid for it, received confirmation and got the address. We didn't have any trouble finding the place and it looked nice from the outside. So Lorie knocked on the door. The nice guy who answered said "No, this isn't an AirBnB house. It is our house and we've lived here since last August." What? We explained our situation to him and he understood, but explained that the woman who had listed it on AirBnB had moved to France over a year ago. He added that she left under "suspicious" circumstances and that she apparently was quite a crook. Seems she's still at it.
AirBnB didn't have any problem taking our money, though. We did find one other place in town that had a room and we rented that. That's a story in itself, but not worth getting in to. We did jump right on the computer and called AirBnB. After going through about 4 layers of "consumer service," Lorie was able to talk to someone who (a) refunded our money, and (b) shut down the AirBnB listing. Weird, eh? We're just glad that we found a room since the next lodging we could find was about 35 km away and we'd already ridden 100 and didn't feel like riding more in the pouring rain.
Lorie then checked all of our other reservations for the rest of the trip and they all check out well.
So to commiserate, we had poutine...
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| It seems like we have to get poutine at least once every time we're in Canada... |
Tomorrow we head due south toward wine country, and we are looking forward to it and maybe some better weather.
