St Andrews

We are in St Andrews, Canada which is right across the border from Maine. In fact, we can see Maine across the water from our campsite. Interestingly, I am picking up the telephone signal from the US and it keeps changing the time on my iPhone back to Eastern Standard Time from Atlantic and back again depending on how close I am to the water.

This is a delightful campground. Kingsbrae Gardens is next door and we are adjacent to downtown. Yesterday after I arrived at our oceanfront campground, I visited Kingsbrae Gardens.

The gardens were still full of flowers and not at all past the prime of summer.

This is sort of an interesting photo. You can see lots of different kinds of flowers, but the unusual ones were the blue thistle which I haven’t seen before.

In addition to all the flowers, they also had a few goats and alpacas and lots of garden sculptures.

A tribute to the queen was recently installed.

I liked this bear. It had a lot of interesting textures.

Today we visited Minister’s Island. You can drive to Minister’s Island in low tide, but you’d better return a few hours later because the tide completely covers the road.

This was the drive over to the island. We all waited until the tide receded enough to expose the road over to the island.

See my location which is the blue dot in the water. You can see on this Google Map where we were driving, in the water. Also, look at the bottom to see where our campground is located on the ocean next to Kingsbrae Gardens and downtown St. Andrews.

This place is called Minister’s Island because one of their very early ministers build his house out on the island. Must have wanted to be accessible to his parishioners?

This was the original minister’s house, with the front darker gray as probably an addition.

Then Sir William Van Horne bought the island, all 500 acres, for his summer cottage. Van Horne was famous for helping to build the trans-Canada railroad. This cottage has 50 rooms – 17 bedrooms, 11 fireplaces and 11 bathrooms. He entertained quite a bit.

This was the front entrance to his home.

These outbuildings housed a water tank and something that made acetylene gas for his lighting.

I won’t post photos of all the antiques because they all start looking the same. What stood out as unusual about this mansion were the fireplaces.

This fireplace was found in the kids nursery. Those are beautiful blue tiles.

This was a beautiful green tile or marble fireplace in one of the bedrooms.

This was the fireplace at the front entrance. The columns are unusual.

This fireplace was found in the dining room.

He also had a bathhouse on the property. It was build at the edge of the ocean. You could go downstairs and come out at sea level to a bunch of flat rocks that would be covered at high tide, but exposed at low tide.

The bathhouse at Van Horne’s summer cottage. It was low tide so I was able to go out on the rocks.

There was also a massive barn where he used to raise Belgium horses, cattle, sheep, etc.

Back to the campground, here’s a photo at high tide.

And here is a photo in the same location at low tide.

They call it “walking on the ocean floor”. I call it walking on the beach. Here’s what some of the ocean floor looks like.

Here I am on the ocean floor looking back at the campground. My rig is up there, second to the right from the stairs. I was one of the lucky ones to get an ocean front lot.

I caught this one yesterday near sunset when I was bicycling around the town.

And after all that fog and drizzle today, it cleared off and presented us with this sunset tonight, our last night of the tour.

Tonight was our farewell dinner because tomorrow is our last day of the tour. We were treated to a fine dinner at the Salt and Bight. Most of us ordered ribs or prime rib or pork chops at this fine seafood restaurant because we’ve had so much cod, lobster and scallops on this trip and are all ready for some red meat. Tomorrow morning I start on my journey back home.

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