The IT Nerd

After checking out of Hotel 71 and having our car delivered by the valet, it was time to head home to Toronto. We didn’t take much picture taking on this last leg of our trip. But we did grab a few pictures on our way out of Quebec City with the Nikon COOLPIX W300 camera:

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The drive was a long one as we were tired after two weeks on the road. Thus took frequent breaks to make sure that we were alert. For the most part the drive was uneventful except for a couple of accidents that we passed, as well as a rainstorm that we passed through as we approached Toronto. Nine hours later, we were home in Toronto.

So after being on the road for two weeks, we can say that Canada is a country that you can’t see on a postcard. We tried to see and do as much as we could over the last two weeks, but we only scratched the surface. If we do something like this again, we could spend two weeks in any one of the five provinces that we passed through. That gives you an idea of what Canada has to offer. There’s a lot in this country that makes this place a great tourist destination for all. And taking a road trip like this allows you to see all of this in a way that you never would from an airplane.

If you’re in Canada, we really recommend taking a trip through Canada as you’ll have a ton of experiences to choose from. For those of you that are reading this travelogue from outside Canada, we encourage you to come and visit. It’s a place where there are not only a lot of diverse experiences on offer, but diversity and differences are celebrated.

Thanks for reading this travelogue and we look forward to posting the text and pictures from our next adventures.

Today was a very long day with two things on our to do list before we arrived at our stop at Quebec City. The first was a drive to see the Hopewell Rocks located just outside Moncton. The cost is $10 a person and a ticket to the Hopewell Rocks will get you in to see the rocks for two days. Quite simply, this place is stunning as evidenced by these pics from the Nikon COOLPIX W300 camera:

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I want to highlight a couple of things that my wife and I managed to capture during our visit:

Drones are clearly a problem here.

This is an ecologically sensitive area. Thus you have to tread lightly if you visit here.

Another sign that this is an ecologically sensitive area is this sign.

If you click to enlarge the above picture and look closely, you’ll see a Peregrine Falcon. We came across a bunch of them nested on a cliffside and flying back and forth, it kept us in place for over 45 minutes watching them fly around.

We also came across a New Brunswick tourism commercial being filmed. The guy in the suit in the canoe is New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant.

After you’re done walking around the rocks and what is basically the ocean floor, you can rinse off your hiking boots here.

After going to the Hopewell Rocks, we started the journey to Quebec City. Along the way, we needed to get the oil changed in our Hyundai Tucson. Now when it comes to vehicle maintenance, I am laser focused on that as I have found that if you take care of your vehicle, it will take care of you. Now when we planned this road trip out, we calculated that we could make the drive to Newfoundland and back within 6000 KMs which would have been within the maintenance window between oil changes. I could then get an oil change when I got back to Toronto. However, with our various detours, we were now at the end of that maintenance window. Thus we needed to find a Hyundai dealer to get an oil change. Originally, we tried the local dealer in Moncton. But they were booked until Friday. So we tried a city that was on our way to Quebec which was Fredricton. That led us to this dealer:

We ended up at Hyundai Of Fredericton and they bent over backwards to fit us in. Not only that, but they were friendly and went out of their way to make things easy for us. For example, they did the oil change on their alignment rack so that we didn’t have to take the bikes off the Tucson’s roof rack. The dealership had a very nice feel and it had speedy WiFi for me to update the photos that I took earlier in the day. Best of all, they told us that it would be about an hour for the oil change. We were in and out in under an hour and we arrived 30 minutes early for our appointment to boot. We can not say enough positive things about them. We really thank them for their hospitality and for their top shelf service.

Speaking of the Tucson, let me share a few words on how it is as a road trip vehicle. It feels solid and is easy and great to drive for long periods of time. It’s easy to pass transport trucks with the 195 pound feet of torque that it has and is comfortable to be in. Plus we were able to fit all of our gear in it. Though some of our stuff was on the rear seat. It for the most part has been racking up fuel economy below 10 liters per 100 KM’s. The only time that it didn’t was in really hilly terrain where it was sub 12 liters per 100 KM’s. The only bit of trouble that we had with it was the climate control system. On the first two days of this road trip, it would work for 5 or so hours and then stop working, which would make the rest of the drive very uncomfortable. However the next day it would work fine. I suspected that there might be some user error at work here. Thus I decided to RTFM and found that the optimal setting for the climate control system was 23 degrees Celsius. We had it set to 17 degrees Celsius. So we set it to 21 degrees Celsius and seemed to work fine for the rest of the trip. Still, I’ll be taking it to the dealer when we get back to Toronto to make sure everything is okay.

For the next seven hours we got to enjoy scenery like this:

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After a couple of refueling stops, we arrived at Quebec City. This time, we were staying at Hotel 71 in the old part of Quebec City. When we rolled up to the door, the valet/doorman greeted us and told us where to part so that we could unload and let them park our Tucson. In the process of taking the bikes off the car so that we could store them in our room, the valet said this:

“Oh, you have a Giant. So do I. I have a TCX cyclocross bike because I am hard on bikes.” 

That then led to five minutes of bike nerd-dom where we talked about our bikes and what parts we had them. Including the fact that I had just upgraded my Giant with these wheels. Let’s just say that he got a really good tip.

Now, Hotel 71 was almost a perfect hotel for us. I’ll get to the parts bothered me first:

This is yet another hotel with a clock radio with a 30-pin dock connector. #Fail. The other fail was the WiFi. It worked from the standpoint that I had no issues using it, but it was intermittently slow. Likely because of load. Either they need to have a few more access points to spread things out for their guests, or they need a bigger pipe into the hotel to support their guests.

But here’s the good stuff. This is an unbelievably upscale hotel with exceptional customer service. Plus there’s a bunch of cool things that I will note:

The bathroom is incredibly upscale and it includes a waterfall shower.

This room actually has a working DVD player, which is the first one that I’ve seen in a hotel in years.

The desk that I worked on had a couple of power outlets and a Ethernet port. I will note that two big power blocks won’t work up here, but there are additional power plugs below the desk.

When you walk up to the bed, the underside of the bed lights up. This is handy at night so that you don’t have to get up and turn on any lights.

Besides the room cards that you get from the hotel, you also get a card that gives you access to a wine vending machine which can sell you wine by the glass.

If you need help choosing a wine, there’s a tablet next to the wine vending machine that can help you with that.

There’s a pair of switches that can set the room number light outside the room so that you can let the hotel staff the following:

Red is do not disturb.

Green is do not clean.

White means that there’s no special instructions for the room. Clearly this is a very cool hotel that a nerd like me can appreciate. After settling into the hotel, we went out to dinner. I’ll let my wife tell you about that:

I am thinking on how precious our vacation time really is as had we arrived a couple of hours earlier to Qubéec City, we would have had time for an earlier dinner at Le Brigantin and then had time to enjoy one of Québec City’s premier event called Les Grands Feux Loto-Québec. This is a special fireworks event takes places steps from our hotel on the river and on this particular Wednesday the theme was classical music. We saw people dressed as Mozart or Beethoven in their white wigs and costume. But alas we had to make a decision to have dinner before all restaurants close up for the night or check out the Les Grands Feux Loto-Québec. 

Le Brigantin offered pasta and was casual and cozy. Hubby ordered the Cheval Blanc beer along with a simple pasta served with tomato pomodoro sauce:

When it arrived at our table you knew it was going to be good as I see the steaming pasta and smell the sweet tomato sauce served with the made in house penne pasta. Through that dish hubby was transported to one of his best pasta memories in Italy. For me I ordered their duck confit salad and it was one of the best salads that I had. It was perfectly balanced and lightly dressed and elevated the salad to umami or next level as the young people say. For dessert hubby order a very decadent brownie while I had a cheese platter. The cheese platter at Le Brigantin is designed to give the diner options. You can order one cheese option which you can have as an appetizer or for me I ordered a two cheese option which they give you two cheeses (one goat and one cow cheese) or you can have a three cheese option which would serve as the main and served with raspberries,

Our next stop is the long drive from Quebec City back to Toronto. Stay tuned for our final entry in this travelogue.

Today we left our hotel in Sydney NS and headed to Moncton. In another example of #FirstWorldProblems, my wife and I decided to go to Starbucks for coffee. This was the same Starbucks that we went to prior to boarding the ferry to Newfoundland and is the only Starbucks location for kilometers. Too bad their point of sale system was down. They were only accepting cash. They weren’t accepting:

• Debit cards
• Credit cards
• Starbucks cards
• Starbucks Rewards

For my wife and I, this is a big deal because we both use the Starbucks apps and we have been hoarding our Starbucks Rewards (in my case, I started this trip with 28 rewards which give me access to a free food or drink per reward. I currently have 19 after using a few on breakfast before the ferry crossing. My wife started this trip 7 rewards after starting with 8) specifically for this trip so that we can consume all the Starbucks coffee and food that we need to keep us fueled. Today, to get our fix we had to pay cash and we couldn’t collect stars to earn additional rewards on top of that. It was so frustrating, my wife wrote an e-mail to Starbucks expressing her point of view on this. She would have used the app to complain, but apparently the Starbucks app for iOS does not have that ability.

Like I said, this is a #FirstWorldProblem.

Once we got over this, we started making our way to Moncton. We traversed the same roads that a week ago were kind of sketchy and even caused an accident that we stumbled upon. Today they were scenic but still sketchy. I’ll show you the former with these pics from the Nikon COOLPIX W300 camera:

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Along the way we went across Nova Scotia and came across sections of The Blue Route which is a network of cycling routes that is in the process of being built that will offer routes on secondary highways with paved shoulders, low traffic volume roads, hard surfaced trails, and city streets. These will eventually connect the entire province. My wife and I agreed that our next trip with our bikes should be here.

We took a couple of detours along the way. First, I needed to grab some cash from an ATM, so we made a stop in Springhill New Brunswick where we stumbled upon this:

This is the Anne Murray Center which showcases the life and times of internationally acclaimed songstress Anne Murray who was born in the town and still has roots there. To my surprise, a tour bus rolled up while we were there and dozens of people walked off the bus into this building. Since opening its doors in July of 1989, the Anne Murray Centre has welcomed more than 400,000 visitors from around the world. Mindblowing.

The next detour was to Port Elgin New Brunswick to visit an uncle of an associate of mine who was offering up some east coast clam chowder. These were all fished personally by the uncle in question. The reason we went an hour out of our way for this is that my wife had some of this a month ago and it was amazing according to her. Thus we managed to score four more mason jars of the stuff.

We then finally made it to Moncton in the late afternoon and checked into the Chateau Moncton which was a very nice place the last time we were there. It was still a nice place this time. Plus unlike the place that we stayed at yesterday, the WiFi was speedy and I was able to get all the photos that had been queued up onto iCloud and shared with my wife in short order. We ended up going to Catch 22 which was busy enough to require reservations. But it was worth it as this is what my wife ended up having:

That’s a 1.5 pound lobster and she polished it off with ease. I stuck with fish n’ chips and I had this east coast beer: 

It tasted a lot like English ales that I was used to. I almost had a second because it was that good, but I had to save myself for a B-52 specialty coffee paired with a homemade lava cake that would make anyone who isn’t diabetic suddenly get the disease. But if you did, it would be well worth it.

Tomorrow is going to be a very busy day. We are making two last minute detours on our way to Quebec City. One is tourism related. One is car related. We’ll fill you in on the details at this time tomorrow.

We got up bright and early at 6AM to start the journey back to Toronto. We have a 7 hour ferry ride from Port Aux Basques Newfoundland to North Sydney Nova Scotia. In short we’re taking the same route that we took to get to Newfoundland. But what’s different is that we are staying in Sidney Nova Scotia which which should be a different experience to “The Bates Motel” based on what my wife says.

First, the drive down to the ferry was very scenic which was great seeing as our drive from the ferry to Corner Brook was rainy. Here’s what we got on the Nikon Nikon COOLPIX W300 camera:

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The drive from Corner Brook to Port aux Basques is about 2.5 hours. And once you check in and get your boarding passes for the MV Highlanders ferry, you have to line up:

From there you will be directed to drive onto one of the three car decks that this ferry has:

Here’s what it looks like to drive onto deck three the ferry:

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From there, you put your car into park, put on the parking brake, get out and lock your car. Then you head up to the passenger decks.

Top Tip: Take everything that you might need for the 7 hour crossing including medication. The ferry crew will not let you access your car for any reason once you leave it.

Now unlike the crossing to Newfoundland, we didn’t have a cabin. That was due to the fact that I screwed that part up. But my wife and I did grab a table and a couple of chairs at the front of the ferry and we found that to be more than adequate. As the ferry left Port aux Basques, I took these pictures from the observation decks:

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I’ll let my wife take over at this point to describe what happened during and after the ferry ride:

The highlight of our return ferry ride was a sighting of some pilot whales along the side of the ferry. Once we docked we headed to our hotel for the night Cambridge Suites Hotel Sydney. We have noticed that some of the east coast hotels have their washroom divided into two rooms: one for toilet and tub and the other for the sink. I’m not sure why this is but I am sure someone local could explain it to me. For this place IT Nerd had a lot to say about the hotel room but what I will say is that we were lucky enough to have a spectacular view of the river from our room and the suite was by far the most spacious room we have had on this trip.

Here’s a picture of the view:

I do have a lot to say about the room from a tech perspective:

On top of a very spacious desk, there was this plug that gave you two AC outlets and two USB charging ports. This was very cool to have as it meant that we could easily keep our devices charged.

Yet again, I found a clock radio with a 30-pin iPod dock. This despite the fact that Apple no longer makes a device that use this type of connector.

#Fail

But that wasn’t the big fail of this hotel. The WiFi that the hotel provided was shambolic. It was slow, and it seemed to actively block connections to iCloud which meant that I could not download pictures off the camera that we brought with us and have them automatically upload to iCloud as a means of backup. Nor could I share them with my wife and nothing I did would resolve the issue. Now Cambridge Suites Sydney uses these guys to serve up their WiFi, and interestingly enough, so did the Greenwood Suites in Corner Brook NL. I did recall having an issue uploading and sharing photos to iCloud on the second last night of our stay. But it cleared itself up after about 90 minutes. Thus I suspect that the humans who provide WiFi for these hotels have some sort of issue, or they are doing something to block access to iCloud. I can’t tell which. Either way, they need to do something about it as I’m pretty sure others would encounter this issue and be none too pleased. In my case, it took a really good hotel experience and knocked it down a couple of notches.

#FirstWorldProblems

I’ll let my wife take over and describe the rest of our stay in Sydney:

Since we arrived early enough, many places were still open for dinner so we managed to snag a reservation to Flavor on the Water which was within walking distance of our hotel. The IT Nerd had a burger with fries, and although I was looking forward to switching from cod to lobster, apparently I am a few weeks behind the lobster season and missed it. They did however have a lobster club sandwich and I paired it with their beet or beetroot (as they call it out here), walnut and goat cheese and argula salad. It was delicious. I then ignored my inner calorie counting mind and ordered their carrot cake with coconut cream cheese frosting. After dinner we enjoyed a walk along the riverfront.

Walking on the riverfront along the boardwalk allowed me to snap a few pictures:

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Two notes:

• The picture of the giant fiddle that you see in the slide show above is where the restaurant was located.
• The picture of the piano has a bit of a story. Apparently it moves about and is left in a location for people to play. Though according to my wife who plays piano, it needs a tune.

Tomorrow we head to Moncton NB with a slight detour along the way to pick up some local “flavor.” Details on that tomorrow.