The plan was to circumnavigate Nova Scotia. We'd leave Orlando with the bikes on a trailer and head up to New York, (where my parents still live) and from there head on our motorcycles for the "Real" part of the trip; Nova Scotia.
From New York we'd head north up through/over to Connecticut into Massachusetts (Great Barrington and Pizza House) up through Vermont and New Hampshire and make our way to the ferry in Bar Harbor; our transit point to Nova Scotia.
Once on Nova Scotia, we'd leave the trailer in Yarmouth and the folks would shadow us, until they went on their own separate trip to Prince Edward Island.
Because we were so far from home, I asked my parents to drive our Xterra as a sort of sag support in case something went wrong.
We don't usually have sag support when we motorcycle travel, but the folks had never been to Nova Scotia(NS) and they wanted to make a side trip over to Prince Edward Island (PEI).
When I travel, I like "Planned Spontaneity". The way this trip was set up, we had a Cruise (the Ferry ride), a Motorcycle journey, some Photography and a little Golf.
We used the Canada
Ferry as our one stop booking shop as we had never been to Nova Scotia and
we didn't know all the ins/outs of a trip there.
We used the website and
followed the directions.
We also called and confirmed everything on the phone. It seemed simple enough!
As it turned out, the Hotels we stayed in were excellent. We were very impressed
that the Ferry people coordinated everything without a hitch.
I would recommend using them for future trips.
This was a pretty ambitious trip that uncovered some realities about motorcycle touring. Taking a motorcycle to places like Nova Scotia and rural New England in the United States requires a set of skills that accepts the occasional dirt road and less than perfect surfaces that touring encounters.
If you can get some Dual Sport Motorcycle time in before you undertake a tour like this, I highly recommend it.
Click to see a day | |||||
| June 21 | June 22 | June 23 | June 24 | June 25 | June 26 |
| June 27 | June 28 - June 29 | June 30 | July 1 | July 2 | July 3 |
| July 4 | |||||
Some people have emailed me and asked for the costs
| Bank Service Fees for International Purchases | $21.90 |
| Gas for Xterra and Bikes for Entire Trip (Regular for Xterra - 93 for the Bikes) | $1205.00 |
| Hotels not in the Canada Ferry Package | $541.88 |
| Meals | $769.09 |
| Misc. | $111.46 |
| Canada Ferry Package Cost for two (Hotels and Ferry Fee Included). | $1584 |
| Grand Total | $4233.33 |
So for a two week vacation it came out to be a little over $2k person which is a bargain for something like this.
Also, I didn't calculate the related costs for the trip like...
Not calculating these costs is fair since we would have bought these things
anyway or needed them for other trips, so that while we bought them for the
Nova Scotia Trip or were semi-related, we won't have to buy them for the next
trip.
In addition, since we planned this trip over the course of a year, we paid for these things over time.
I guess close to $10k for the trip might seem a bit much.