August – September, 2015
After our Summer season of circus camps and special events came to an end, we headed off on an adventure! 
We put approximately 5,500 miles on our Prius (50+ mpg all the way!), in order to get to France from Wisconsin. The part of France that’s just off the coast of Newfoundland, that is. Our route took us through Vermont, New Hampshire, Coastal Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and unexpectedly, Newfoundland. We had planned on flying part of the way, but a last-minute cancellation of the last flight of the season back from the islands to Sydney, N.S. added another 30 hours of driving time and about 18 hours at sea to our travel adventure.
The remote, lovely islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon are Mars’ ancestral,paternal homeland. Everyone with the last name Miquelon is descended from an infant boy who fled the islands in the mid-19th century and was orphaned en route, adopted in Quebec City, and named after the islands. Foggy skies are countered by
vividly painted buildings, and when the fog does clear, the whole population turns out for ice cream, soccer and socializing in the town square. One of our favorite discoveries was wandering into the school/community gymnasium on Miquelon island, and finding ten unicycles and as many pairs of stilts tucked away in a storage room! 
Maybe one day we will return to offer a circus camp….
On our way East, we stopped and volunteered for the weekend with Bread and Puppet , an amazing community of artists, founded and sustained by Peter Schumann and his wife on their beautiful farmland in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Such an inspiring, art-filled weekend!
Want to see more nice pictures? We’ve got lots! Click here for the whole collection.
So great you guys! What an adventure, fabulous!!