A Little Break

     After all the plans were made for their trip, Brad found out he had to be at the hospital on Monday for the accreditation team that was rescheduled. Plans were quickly made for Sister Holbrook to leave the office (with President Pratt's permission, of course) for a few days and fly to Portland, Maine, on Monday to meet Heather and the girls and help with luggage and car rental and crowd control (yes, four girls under ten are considered a crowd). Elder Holbrook stayed behind and kept the office running.

     Mother Nature had other ideas. Their flight from Baltimore to Portland got canceled because of weather in Maine, but Southwest got them to Boston, a two-hour drive from Portland. The problem was that their luggage didn't make it to Boston, so they had no car seats. Fortunately Heather found a bus that would take them to Portland for a reasonable fee. As it ended up, there were no weather problems in Portland. Heather has no idea why the flight was canceled.

     Sister Holbrook got to Newark, where she was delayed because of lack of a flight crew, mechanical problems, and then one of the most awesome lightning storms she's ever seen. The rain was so intense it looked like it was snowing instead of raining, and of course, the airport was shut down. After standing in line for three hours, she was finally told there were no seats left on any flights into Portland until the next evening, and by then Heather and the girls were going to be in Canada, meeting up with Brad in St. John. They finally booked her on a flight straight back to Halifax two days later and begrudgingly gave her a hotel room for the night. The upside is the hotel room ended up being a suite with a huge hot tub, comfortable sitting room, and king bed. The downside was she spent more time in the Newark Airport than she did at the hotel! There was another upside: after spending nearly two hours on the phone, she managed to get a flight to Portland the next morning, where Heather met her with the rental car and luggage already taken care of.

     Tuesday was Hadley's 5th birthday. Heather had a full day planned, including renting a golf cart and driving around Peak's Island. It was a lot of fun.

     They drove across the border and immediately lost an hour (Atlantic Canada is an hour ahead of Maine), so they got to the hotel quite late and it was nearly midnight before the girls settled into bed. The hotel was magic--when they woke up on Wednesday morning, Daddy was sleeping in one of the beds!

     The area around the Bay of Fundy is gorgeous. They ended up at Hopewell Rocks, where the tides are very dramatic. It was interesting to see the area they played on when they first arrived was soon under water.

Beach toys aren't as much fun on rocks

The beach is fairly rocky with mud instead of sand 

Soon after low tide

     And then turn to the right a little and look up to see this:

Grandma, Myla, and Hadley, chillin'

After a couple of hours they went up to the pavilion and got ice cream. Myla almost wore as much as she ate. Too bad there wasn't a dog nearby to clean up after her--it would have had a feast!

     Scroll up and see all the people walking around. That's all covered and these kayakers have taken their place. There were probably about 3 dozen people in kayaks. And there are still two more hours before high tide, when the water gets to the top of the black part of the rocks!

     There can be a difference of up to 46 feet from low to high tide in a little over 6 hours. The highest tides are during a full moon, so the difference wasn't quite that much while they were there, but it was still awesome!

     One more stop. This is one of our favorite stops--the inland lighthouse at the information centre at the border from New Brunswick to Nova Scotia. Every time we've gone past it, we've always stopped to take pictures.

     Then it was on to see Papa!


     More next week when Papa is in tow!




     We are thankful for the effort our kids put into keeping family ties strong.