Best Pit Stop Ever... so far!

798 Miles – Approx. 1284 Km into our trip
Location: Shellnutt’s Family Restaurant, N.S.

Hello People of the Interwebs!

I’m coming in a little late to the blogging game, but now that our adventures have truly begun I have stories to tell.  Well, story.

After a long day of driving through New Brunswick and making important, intentional aesthetic changes to the van (see blog post below) we decided to take a well-deserved rest at a service station just off Highway 2 in Nova Scotia. Little did we know that it would be the highlight of our day.

The first thing we did when we arrived was – SURPRISE – fill The Beast with gas. Too many litres later, she was full and we parked her alongside the station to look over her vitals. Transmission fluid: check! Tire pressure:  check! Oil: needed a top-up.

Coasting on the pride of having remembered how to check the oil, we fell off our high horse when we realized we weren’t  100% positive as to how to fill the oil, exactly.  Or which oil we needed to buy:  5W-30 or 10W-30? Venturing into the gas station, we decided to put our faith in strangers and asked someone which oil they recommended. 10W it was!

We thanked the person who helped us, paid for the oil and headed back to the vehicle. On the way, we laughed and tried to remember EXACTLY what we had been taught about adding the oil. Upon returning to the car, lo and behold an entire pit crew mulling around our van – among which was the man who helped us pick the oil. This was the beginning of a very happy, if short lived friendship.

You see, this Nova Scotian crew was just on their way back from a car race in New Brunswick.  And being obvious vehicle enthusiasts, they were more than happy to chat about our trip and walk us through adding the oil. (FYI: we did know how to properly add the oil and could have done it all by ourselves.)  They even went so far as to give us a couple of bottles of their own oil for the road! (Generalizing from this experience – I agree that maritimers are the friendliest people around!)

After saying goodbye to the crew, we went back into the station for a bite to eat. The restaurant was a nice little diner with a sign saying “Today’s Special: Turkey Dinner.” Deciding that the special seemed like just the right thing, that’s what we ordered. This is what we got:

We were not disappointed!

Once we’d finished our meals and getting our (unexpected) free dessert to go, we headed back to the van to drive the last leg of our “Ottawa to Halifax Airport” portion of the trip.

--Julie