I have a zillion pictures of this campground. And I would google zillion right now, to see just how hyperbolic I’m being (pretty darn hyperbolic, I have to admit) but my internet is down to super-slow speeds so I’m not going to. I think Verizon might be hinting that it’s time to stop using the Canadian cell towers, sigh. My super-slow internet also means that I’m not going to post my zillion pictures. Instead, I’m going to have to decide on one or maybe two that I will watch upload in painfully slow motion. It’s not an easy decision, made more difficult by the fact that none of them are good enough.

None of them capture the sound of the water. It changes, and I’m not sure I’ve ever actually spent enough time sitting by a beach to realize how much the sound of the waves varies over the course of the day. Or maybe it’s just this beach. The tide goes way, way out — in the middle of the day, there’s half a desert between me and the water, but in the morning, it’s more of a wide rocky strip. Sometimes the water is very quiet, gently brushing against the shore, so still that even listening hard I can barely hear it, and then sometimes it’s lapping at the shore so loudly that I’m reminded that yes, I am sitting next to the ocean. (Sort of the ocean, anyway. I’m on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.)

And no photo can capture the feel of the air. The weather has been lovely — sometimes sunny enough that it actually does feel hot, although I doubt the temperature has broken 75, and sometimes foggy enough that it definitely feels chilly, but mostly hovering in the mid-60s. But it’s just not the temperature — it’s the perfect level of humidity. It feels like there’s always just a light breeze, carrying a little bit of moisture.

And for some reason, none of my photos are getting the colors right. There’s an incredible number of wildflowers blooming right now. I’m looking outside the van window as I write at an expanse of yellow-gold and green, but the pictures capture the blue of the ocean behind the gold and turn the gold into a dull yellow that doesn’t come anywhere close to looking right.

And, of course, it’s impossible to take a photo of the moon and the stars, but I’ve watching them every night from my window as I go to sleep. Here’s a thing that made me feel stupid: over two years of living in the van, and I never realized that the tinted windows were distorting the brightness level of the stars. I’ve been sleeping with the window open and they’re so much more beautiful that way.

It would be nice to see the stars without the screens, too, but that’s never going to happen because the one thing about Nova Scotia that is really not working for me are the voracious mosquitoes. They’re not as bad as they were at the farm on Prince Edward Island, but I keep needing to tell myself that to tolerate them. Almost every walk on the beach ends when the mosquitoes find me and I wind up needing to escape from the ones that are dive-bombing my face. Still, they’re not constant — they’re worst at dusk and dawn, and in the middle of the day, I’ve been sitting outside perfectly happily. So excuse the whining!

I do really love this campground, love that is definitely helped by the fact that I have a perfect site. I started out last week at a pull-through spot, sort of in the middle of the campground, and it was still nice. I had a good view of the ocean, although a better view of my neighbors’ campers, and the beach was still a very easy walk away. The campground’s not too big, with both seasonal and tent spots, and it’s not too busy either, this time of year. They have a “stay three, get one free” deal, so I was going to stay four nights.

But after two nights, a spot opened up right next to the cliff that overlooks that water and I thought, “hmm…” so I wandered back up to the office and asked if I could have it. Yep. I paid for another three (four) nights after that, so when I leave here on Wednesday, I will have been here for eight nights! Eight! It’s close to my longest stay at any campground, and if I didn’t have reservations and plans for later in the month, I think I’d probably be aiming to stay even longer.

Yesterday, I ate blueberry pancakes with tiny wild Canadian blueberries and Vermont maple syrup, plus Berkshire bacon from the organic farm, while sitting at a picnic table watching horseback riders on the beach. I wondered whose life was more perfect at that moment, the horseback riders splashing through the water or me, and concluded that I won because my pancakes were crazily delicious (gluten-free) and they were probably surrounded by mosquitoes. But it did feel unreal in a most lovely sort of way.