Susan Serven

“Maine would be a fun place to visit again but the drive to Acadia, Portsmouth, Bar Harbor is so long…maybe there’s a cruise for that?!”

Indeed there was and it was a great one.

In late August, early September 2022 we booked a Royal Caribbean 9-day cruise through New England, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and New Brunswick, Canada. It was a beautiful trip through New England and points on the Atlantic Coast of Canada.

For us, it was an easy drive to NYC to jump on the ship and get settled.

Since our first stop was Boston, and since we’ve been there dozens of times, have family in the area, we decided to instead take a ferry to Pronvincetown.

(Note: this is normally not something that is advisable! It means leaving your cruise ship and taking a ferry – or car, train but some form of travel that is not associated with your cruise – to another stop. It can be fun but you need to be sure you are back in plenty of time to get back on your ship or you can lose a day or more of travel time which could ruin your cruise.)

Provincetown is colorful, so pretty, a lot of fun, great walking and fantastic restaurants. We had a bright, sunny day, people are really friendly, and it was perfect.

After getting back (in time) to our ship, we traveled on to Portsmouth, ME, which is set on a peninsula extending into Casco Bay. The Old Port waterfront features working fishing wharves and converted warehouses with restaurants and shops. We were just in time to watch the pier vendors and artists setting up and did some shopping while we waited for our excursion on an antique wooden sail boat on the bay.

We took a tour to Fort Williams Park in Cape Elizabeth to see the Portland Head Light, Maine’s oldest lighthouse, commissioned by George Washington and built between 1787 and 1791.

From there we sailed on to Bar Harbor, a historic coastal town on Mount Desert Island very near to Acadia National Park. We did a short tour of Acadia (just enough to know we needed to go back) and grabbed some lobster and shopping in this beautiful waterfront town. Even in the pouring rain it was still a lot of fun.

Then on to Newfoundland and the Bay of Fundy and the Fundy Trail! I had no idea what to expect except for what I saw during a quick google search, but the Fundy Trail is magnificent!We took a light hike down part of the Fundy Trail, to the Big Salmon Suspension Bridge (scarier than it looks!) which is a key feature on the Fundy Trail.

The bridge spans the Big Salmon River and offers access to several hiking trails as well as some great views of the river gorge. The area is a hub for logging and shipbuilding.

My favorite stop of all, though, was the St. Martin’s Sea Caves, located along the Bay of Fundy. We walked right down the rocky sands from a restaurant we stopped in, started exploring the caves, realized the tide was coming in (!) and made our way back to our bus.

It’s an easily accessible, amazing site, right in front of you, no tickets, no lines, incredible.

From there we went on to Peggy’s Cove in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a famous fishing village, conservation area, and one of the most visited places in Canada. You can walk around the rugged coast, head up on to some GIANT rocks, visit the shops and see the iconic Peggy’s Cove Lighthouse. Peggy’s Cove is a charming town, very picturesque, and really fun to walk around.

Lastly, we visited the Titanic gravesite in Halifax, actually three cemeteries (Fairview Lawn (121 graves), Mount Olivet (19 graves) and Baron de Hirsch (10 graves) which serve as the final resting place for more than one hundred victims of the sinking of the Titanic.

It was a wonderful trip, a terrific way to see areas that would otherwise be a very long drive for us, and the views at each of the sites, but, especially, from the ship itself, are incredible.

The brisk North Atlantic, with its floating icebergs and frozen air, is a sight to behold.