New Brunswick – Bay of Fundy Coast

We returned to Canada on August 11 by way of the Province of New Brunswick after spending more time in Acadia National Park in Maine than we had in any other place on this trip.  In all the excitement of stopping at the duty free shop for a couple bottles of Campari, answering all the questions thrown at us at customs and being right in the town of St. Stephen after the boarder, we forgot to take a picture of a “Welcome to New Brunswick” sign or it did not exist, so that tradition hit the dust.  (BTW, bringing pepper spray into Canada is a weapon and illegal unless it specifically says bear spray, or at least that is what that particular customs officer told us!)

In St. Stephen we cruised into the the Tourist Information Center for maps, tips, etc.  We were lucky to get Wayne to steer us to some cool stuff on our coastal journey through New Brunswick that would lead us to Nova Scotia.  Wayne was middle age or maybe older and told us his ancestors on his father’s side were English Loyalists from the U.S. colonies who settled in the potato farming area in western New Brunswick after the English won the war against France and deported many of the French settlers.  Even with that history New Brunswick is officially bilingual so pretty much all signs are in English and French.  This is in contrast to Quebec where young girls, who seemed to always staff the Quebec Visitor Centers could barely speak English and all signs are only in French.

We had wide-ranging discussions with Wayne about how we would be going through New Brunswick along the eastern shore to get to Nova Scotia and return after visiting the other Maritime provinces to go northwest through New Brunswick to reach Quebec City and Montreal.  We asked about possibly seeing whales in the St. Lawrence Seaway on the way to Quebec as we were told by a couple we met at an ice cream stand in Maine, and he made us aware of the world class experience of whale watching “just down the road” off St. Andrews, including Finbacks, the second largest whales in existence.  We told him how excited we were to see huge tide surges when we get to Nova Scotia, and he said “just down the road” is Hopewell Rocks, where the tidal action is within inches of the record amount that occurs in Nova Scotia.  We asked him where would be a good place to see the Perseus meteor shower that was supposed to peak in a day, and he said, that would be “just down the road” at Fundy National Park, where we should be able to be in one of the darkest clearest places on earth!  And how right he was, as we followed through on all three of these tips and had a great time.

We thought it best to camp in the “Ocean Front Camping” campground right in St. Andrews as we made reservations for an Island Quest Marine wale watching boat and needed to be there pretty early the next day.  We were fascinated by two Quebec women traveling together, both with dogs and both with very small cars that were camped next to us, so we went over to chat with them.  They were very nice, but only one could speak English, even though she was a French teacher!  We had noticed Quebec license plates have the saying je me souviens on them and were told it means we remember we are French and we remember our culture.  Again, another indication of the difficulty Canada has as a multilingual country!  LugNutGuy lived in Switzerland for a year at one time and felt they do just fine with virtually everyone being able to speak German, French and English in a country that officially has four languages, German, French, Italian and Romansh.  They put just about every country to shame in that sense, but he doubts that any Swiss person resents knowing three languages, and Switzerland has be around a long time without upheavals!  As LugNutGal would say, What’s the big woop?

Our Quebec neighbors with their cute little cars, cute little tents and cute but not so little dogs

Our Whale watching boat ride was very nice.  The particular boat was recommended as a good one for any weather, and given our experience, that was a big deal.  The weather turned out just great, and there were two marine biologists on board along with about 30 people, which worked out great.  We did a boat tour a while back along the Napali (north) Coast of Kauai in advance of kayaking it, and would not expect anything as good as we had then with every whale seen breaching and getting to swim among curious dolphins!  But we still had a good time seeing Finback whales, the second largest after Blues, dolphins, eagles, a bird sanctuary island and harbor seals in the extremely beautiful setting of all the islands in the area.  We even saw mirages over some of the distant islands that we had never experienced before!

St. Andrews, NB

Heading out of St. Andrews for Whale watching

That’s about a 60 to 80 ft whale

White Horse Island bird sactuary

Harbor seals that we have not seen in so many different colors

Mirage over a distant island

Mirages all over the place

. Returning to port

Our next stop was Saint John, where there was supposed to be a spectacular reversal of flow up a rapids as the huge tide in this area sweeps in.  We got there at 2:00 and saw nothing like that.  The women next to us said it happened at 1:54, but even then it was hardly a huge deal—So goes the tourism industry.

 
Bad timing in Saint John or the tide reversal was no big deal

From Saint John we drove further and finished the day at Fundy National Park and a campground named Headquarters Campground.  That decision got us showers three days in a row—a record so far on this trip—the smellin’ was good!  The nice girl at the campground office tried to be helpful about where to see the Perseus meteor shower peaking that night, but after setting up camp, i.e. just pulling LugNutVan next to our picnic table, we started wondering where the really good place to be would be.  After all, any light from the bathrooms across the way would not make our site the darkest place on the planet!  So before it got dark, we drove around and realized even the beach adjacent to the campground was across the water from the little town of Alma and its light.  We finally decided on Herring Cove and the picnic area there above the beach.  Even though the moon was waxing crescent after being new six days previously, it had to set before the sky was really dark.  And on this east coast of New Brunswick on the edge of the Bay of Fundy, it was dark!  For a couple of hours after the moon set, we saw dozens of shooting stars while lying our our backs on a picnic table, LugNutGuy with an upside down bowl and jacket for a pillow.  But what was so shocking was how unfamiliar we were with the stars after not seeing such a splendid display in who knows how long.  We did not remember that the stars rotate around the North Star CCW and that the Milky Way is a band of light about parallel to the handle of the Big Dipper about the same distance above the North Star as the handle is below.  At least we recognized the Big Dipper which seemed much closer to the horizon than we remembered.  We called it a night when the first star of the big dipper dropped below the horizon, and drove back to our spot in the campground, ruining it for anyone that was still up watching from there—but it seemed like no one was up or knew that this was the night to be gazing upward!  The only person we talked to before leaving in the morning knew nothing about it—what a shame!

All this reminded LugNutGuy of an interview with a well-known astronomer on public radio a while back that brought out the worry in the research community  that so few kids get the opportunity to see the heavens with so much light pollution these days that fewer future scientists will choose to study the field.

Sorry, no pictures of the sky!  With our camera and knowledge, even with a tripod, we were afraid we would miss the entire show if we tried to impress our friends with photos!

We left Fundy National Park with sun and coastal fog playing with each other and drove along the coast to Hopewell Rocks, which is one of the biggest tourist draws in New Brunswick, because of a tide height of around 40 ft that exposes very interesting rocks

Fundy National Park and the typically well groomed grounds so different from U.S. national parks

The dock in Alma right outside the national park showing the “cradles” that are pulled up to the hull with ropes when boats are docked so they don’t tip on their side during low tide—seems to be much easier than having floating docks.

The beauty of the foggy coast as we saw it could not come close to being captured in our photos

Overview of Hopewell Rocks from about 101 steps above the beach at exactly low tide

At high tide the water is slightly above the seaweed (about 10 ft from the base you see), but that is about 40 ft above low tide with most of that height being up the slanted beach

The beach is pretty lifeless and muddy as the enormous about of water that flows in and out with the tides just keeps churning up the bottom

Artsy fartsy shot of LugNutGal at Hopewell Rocks

Our stay in New Brunswick ended the same day we left Hopewell Rocks, but not before we stopped at Patty’s Place in Hillsborough where it appeared to have the correct number of local’s cars parked outside.  Pretty good cookin’ there, and we thought it was time to start checking out the poutine served in the Maritimes so we will know what real poutine in Quebec is when we return there.

Poutine with mozzarella (mozza) cubes and a pretty tasty gravy—it was indeed better than what Ed started serving up the street in our ‘hood in Seattle!  To all our neighbors there—eat you hearts out!

After the above gut-filling lunch, it was fueling up and getting groceries in Moncton, New Brunswick before entering Nova Scotia via a causeway just before Amherst.  In Moncton it took forever to fuel because of how friendly people were.  Most of the time was with a guy named Wayne, who pulled up and asked if LugNutVan was four-wheel drive.  That led to hearing of his life story about getting hit while in a pickup at an intersection by a semi traveling 120 km/hr, being dragged hundreds of feet in the process and taking years to get back his life.  He and his 6’1” wife want to do a small RV, and he was interested in a layout like ours for that reason.  Another guy came along who wanted the pump at the same island LugNutVan was hogging.  He had the original Honda three cylinder, one liter hybrid, and he is having so much fun “hypermileaging,” which is figuring out the best way to drive by experimenting with technique and using the exact same pump every fill-up.  A third person joined in after seeing our WA plates, who we had to convince were not stolen given how far we would have to have come if they were real.  We were in New Brunswick only three days, but will be returning later, on the way to Quebec, and we can’t wait—it was great!