A US/Canada Day

On our first full day in Canada, what did we do?  Why travel back to the US to get to a Canadian island, of course!  I hadn’t realize that we’d have to do that in order to explore down one of the drives in the travel book that I had for exploring the Atlantic Canada provinces.  So, we had to cross the US/Canadian border 4 times!

Mulholland Lighthouse was built to guide ships through the Lubec Narrows, a body of water that separated Campobello Island, New Brunswick, and the town of Lubec, Maine.  The lighthouse was completed in 1884, and the light was installed in 1885.  Campobello Island is the island where FDR would spend summers as a child, and the estate took up quite a lot of land on the island.  It is here that FDR was first stricken with polio which left him paralyzed from the waist down.  Eleanor Roosevelt used to visit the island more than FDR did after they married, and her last visit to the island was just a few weeks before her death in1962.

Mulholland Lighthouse

At the opposite end of Campobello Island is Head Harbor Lighthouse, which is also known as East Quoddy Lighthouse.  The bay it sits in is Passamaquoddy Bay.  It was the first warning for ships of the craggy rocks located around Campobello Island.  This image was taken when the tide was coming in.  During low tide, one used to be able to walk from the island to the lighthouse. There were stairs going down to what would be land from both the island and the lighthouse.  However, when we were there, the steps down to the “land” were partially destroyed and access was chained off.  The area where one would walk is the area where the waters are the most churning during the tide change.  I don’t know exactly how deep the waters were at the time this image was taken, but my guess is they were well over my head, even with the tide not being completely in! 

Head Harbor Lighthouse

One of the interesting things that we noticed when driving in northern Maine and certainly throughout New Brunswick and Nova Scotia is that there are a LOT of small cemeteries.  Altho we couldn’t find anything to confirm it, our guess is that back in the late 1800s, communities were much more insular, and so, each community had its own cemetery.  The cemetery in Lubec, Maine, seemed to be an old one, with several headstones that I saw dating back to the late 1800s.  

Headstone Down

Enjoy!