{East Coast 2}

For our first day of real adventure we headed right out after breakfast to make the short 45 minute drive from Moncton to the Hopewell rocks.

Once we'd arrived and payed our way inside we made our way to a few lookout points along the way, took some pictures and just generally enjoyed the beautiful day.

To get to the flowerpot rocks, the main thing people come for, you follow a path through the trees. It kind of reminded me of camping in Alberta!

When we got to the platform overlooking the rocks it was still high tide so all there is to do is look and take pictures. We watched a group kayaking around the rocks too!

The platform had a set of stairs that leads directly into the water during high tide and onto the floor of the bay during low tide. Obviously when it's high the end of the stairs are roped off, but you can still get pretty close.

After a while we left this area to go walk on a nearby beach. As it would turn out, my love of sea glass was born here! We found several pieces and had lots of fun hunting for them. Just for fun we collected rainbow rocks too!

Having had our beach time fun we stopped back at the flowerpots to see where the water was at. It had gone about halfway down in the time we'd been away, but the sea floor still wasn't accessible.

Back to the restaurant near the entrance of the park, we stopped for lunch and to kill some time.

Once again, back at the flowerpots. Finally the tide was low and we could walk out. It's pretty amazing to think of how high the water had just been and now I'm able to walk on the bottom, without even stepping in a puddle! We explored this way and that way, took countless photos, and had a continuous discussion about taking our shoes off and playing in the mud.

Eventually the urge was too strong and we ended up barefoot and muddy up to the ankle. The red mud is so perfectly slick and squishy, I swear it's made for bare feet!!

In the end when it was time to put our shoes back on we had to wash the mud away in the cold bay water and "dry" our feet with the single napkin I happened to have in my pocket! It's all in the adventure though, and I loved every minute of it!

In total we spent about 5 or 6 hours exploring the park.

At some point during the day we decided to have supper in Shediac instead of Moncton and check out what was there.

Our first stop was the worlds largest lobster, very fitting considering that Shediac is the lobster capital of the world. It's also the 25th anniversary of the giant lobster. We had our fun climbing on him and then spent some time checking out the area near by and picking up maps in the visitor centre.