Ken is a retired pilot, sailor, and photographer whom I had met through my connections with Photoshop, the newsgroup, and my art contests. After his wife Rosalie provisioned us well, and i had settled Penny into a safe place below, we were off into the North West Arm, an inlet just west of Halifax. 

Ken's boat is a 36' sloop called the Tazar III. It is a beautiful white fibreglass boat with lots of wood trim. A place for everything, of course. There is a fridge and a stove. The stove is on a gimbal (sp?) which is a system that keeps its surface level no matter what the boat does. There is a head, of course, which comes with elaborate flushing instructions. <g> 

We sailed around Point Pleasant Park and Martello Tower into Halifax Harbour. Ice cream was next on the agenda, and we did it right! We went to a little place called "Cows" which has a boat dock right to it! After we parked the boat and had our ice cream (I got Cow Crunch and Penny had vanilla which she just ate a little of.), Michael got a photo of me clowning around atop their cow statue.

Barry at the campground recommended a vet and we drove Penny there. During the time that we had to wait, we said tearful goodbyes. We did have a funny moment when I had set a kleenex too close to her and she grabbed it and began to chew it. She was a chewer from the beginning to the end; she had never even slowed down.

She had always been such a lively, active, playful, and loving little dog, it had been hard for us to see her lose the active and lively part. 

So we are having a sad day today. 

Penny
6/6/86 - 6/26/01

As we sailed on southeast going past Herring Cove, Ketch Harbour, Crystal Crescent Beach, though, the water was really quite choppy, with some waves at 7 feet or more. No one actually got sick, but Ken and I were a little green at one point. I wish that i'd been able to take some pics of these waves, but i just couldn't.

After our supper, I took these pictures of a pair of gulls who had taken interest in us.

Wonderful time, beautiful day!!

We followed Ken to his house where his wife Rosalie had prepared a very interesting and delicious feast for us. (Read about this here.)

We got home close to midnight, tired, but exhilarated from our wonderful first experience of sailing.

We went to the Sou'wester and had a great lunch/supper which you can read about here. :P

We drove part of the way along the St. John's River, a beautiful drive punctuated by quaint little churches and houses, pretty farms with rolling hills, and forests of pine and birch. We saw 2 deer and an eagle's nest that had a little eagle's head peeking out!

The driving was pretty easy. We did much of it on Canada's Trans-Canada Highway, some of which was 2 lane, but all of which was pretty easy to drive. In general we have found that the roads in Canada are more difficult to manage than are the ones in the US. I think that the difference is that in the US, the road makers assume nothing. In Canada, they assume that we know what we are doing as we drive, which is not always the case!

As luck would have it, when we arrived here at Yogi Bear's Jellystone Camp Resort, they had just 2 spots left, one that they deemed perfect for us. We drove to the site and pulled *up* into it. We were 12 inches off-level front  to back and 5 inches off-level from left to right. We used all the wood we had and even dug a little in the gravel in our vain attempt to level the rig.

When we went to the office and reported our problem, the campground owner, a most pleasant gentleman, was summoned and he brought a rick of wood and tried to help us level. 

Finally, in desperation, I suggested that perhaps we could be allowed to park in the big lot by the office. He agreed and said that we could even use his electricity from the shop. 

We are now in this really laughable "site", muddy gravel with a basketball goal on one side of us (where the boys are always running across our "site" to retrieve their ball, and a go-cart track on the other. Not only that, we didn't even manage to escape the campfires. Even though there is no site within 200 feet of us, we must be downwind of ALL of them and their damned smoky campfires. Yick.

Moreover, Michael discovered that the cord that they had given us had its polarity reversed, but he discovered this before we  destroyed any of our delicate onboard electronics. We ended up not using their power at all.

"Well," we thought," we will certainly not be charged for a site, since we don't have one." Wrong again. Michael went to the office and was refunded just $2 for the site. "No service" sites are $25 and full-service are $27. Unbelievable.