South of the river we got on Autoroute 20, Quebec's leg of the Trans-Canada Highway, which we took northeastward. We stopped briefly at a most interesting rest area. In addition to the requisite picnic tables and restrooms, there were salesmen hawking food and beverages from the sides of trucks. Almost everyone else at the rest area was from Quebec, and they seemed to appreciate the vendors.
The drive from the rest area on to Quebec City was short, but unpleasant. Traffic was VERY heavy, and it was raining harder. At times it was difficult to see, but that didn't stop the Quebecois drivers from zipping past us at well over the speed limit (which was now 100 km/h-a little over 60 mph). I was very glad to find the exit for our campground and be able to leave the freeway.
We camped early at the town of Saint-Nicolas (yes, like Santa Claus), just outside Quebec City. We got the trailer set up as quickly as we could in the rain, and then we all got into my car, crossed the river again, and fought the traffic to visit the city.
Quebec was founded by the French in 1608, one year after the British founded Jamestown, Virginia. It is far older than Boston or New York, and it has been a major city for well over three centuries. Of the cities in Canada, only Saint John's, Newfoundland (which was founded in the 1500s) is older. However, the first thing a traveler sees after crossing the river to Quebec is certainly not ancient. Sainte-Foy, which bills itself as "Canada's insurance centre" is as modern and bustling a suburb as anything you'd find in Los Angeles or Chicago. It's a string of malls, apartments, and office buildings, with some of the heaviest traffic in Canada.
East of Sainte-Foy is the town of Sillery, a VERY wealthy residential community with wide boulevards lined by beautiful stone row houses. All along the way were banners proclaiming "Salut Sillery - 350 ans", saluting the town's 350th anniversary. If you do your subtraction, that means it was founded in 1637. Nothing in Sillery today looks more than 100 years old, though. Many of the buildings are from the Art Deco era of the early 20th Century-a few just a bit older. It's a pretty town, though, and it reeks of money.
Beyond Sillery is the city limit of Quebec. This part of the city is not overly nice. It is row houses, just like Sillery, but they have been "gentrified" beyond all recognition. There are exclusive restaurants and clubs along here, pricey boutiques-but no REAL business. Most American cities have this section, too; it's always beautiful, but I always feel very out of place there.
As you drive along Chemin Saint-Louis you very suddenly see the walls of the ancient city ahead of you. Like old European cities, Quebec had massive stone walls to keep out invaders (both English and Indian). Only a small fraction of the modern city lies within the walls, but that is the only part that has much touristic interest.
The highway passes through a narrow gate in the wall, and suddenly you are in the old quarter-a place that tries its hardest to look like the "typical" section of a small European city. The streets are very narrow, but cars zip along them anyway (just as they do in Europe). The buildings are brick and stone, and while fire destroyed much of the city in this century, the buildings were rebuilt to look like the originals. The streets wander aimlessly, following old trails and the lay of the land-like most European streets do-rather than in the straight grid for which America is famous. There are plazas (in French "places") at major intersections, featuring traffic circles with old statues in them. The place even smells like a European city-the old part of town in much of Europe carries a not terribly healthy smell that's a cross between sewage and smog. This probably isn't intentional in Quebec, but it does add to the atmosphere.
The only thing that keeps Quebec from seeming truly European is that it is first and foremost a tourist trap. The old quarter of European cities have REAL businesses-department stores, clothing stores, office supply stores, doctors, lawyers, business offices, fast food, cafes, bars, etc. In short, people live and work in old European cities. Quebec is a city of souvenir shops and expensive restaurants. Local people do roam the streets, but they seem out of place in a locale that caters primarily to visitors. I would imagine they either work for the provincial government or in the tourist trade. There are rooms for rent all over the city. I would bet the rooms are popular with students, artists, and the like-but not with the middle class. The metropolitan population of Quebec is around 600,000. Less than 50,000 live within the walls.
We drove around for a while and eventually parked in a massive underground garage beneath the "Hotel de Ville" (city hall). It was pouring rain, but since this was our chance to see Quebec, we walked around the old city-wet or not. The most interesting part of the walk was the Cote-de-la-Montagne, a long, steep, curving street that leads from "Upper Town" to "Lower Town". Quebec is built on a cliff, with part of the town on top of the cliff and the rest down on the river. Cote-de-la-Montagne (which means "next to the mountain") is the one street that connects the two parts. We took a shortcut going down to lower town, walking down an "Escalier" or staircase that was named as if it were a street. We were fully soaked by this time and more or less decided that one part of town looks a lot like another in the rain, so we headed back to the car.
Parking was surprisingly cheap for a tourist trap-only Can$1.50 (US$1.10). We paid the cashier, found our highway again, and re-traced our steps through Sillery and Sainte-Foy. I stopped at a Petro-Canada station in Sainte-Foy for gas and was surprised and confused by their computerized credit card system. For some reason (I still don't know why), I didn't need to sign any document to charge my gas. The computer just printed me a receipt, and I was on my way. (Needless to say, it showed up right away on my next statement.)
We needed to buy some Kleenex, so we stopped at a mall next to the Petro-Canada station. It was definitely not a place to buy so common an item as Kleenex. Place Sainte-Foy was, without question, the most elegant mall I have ever set foot in. It was enormous and pretentious and unpleasant to be in. We eventually found the one cheap store in the mall, a place called "Miracle Mart" (named in English). Unfortunately between the French signs and the confusing layout of the store we never did find any Kleenex. We soon gave up and ran through the rain back to the car.
Ste-Foy is home to what has to be the world's largest McDonalds. Just a block east of the freeway is a huge three-story structure that looks like an office building. The entire building is ONE McDonalds restaurant. We stopped here for dinner, both for the novelty of the place and to avoid the ridiculous prices the real restaurants were charging. Inside the entire décor is dull pink. Tables are arranged on all the floors, and there is an indoor McDonaldland in the basement. Half of the main flood is taken up by the kitchen and a huge order counter. Again I rehearsed my order ahead of time (un filet de poisson, un lait frappe au chocolat, patates frites grand, et un café grand-fish, shake, fries, and coffee). I needn't have been so careful; in this tourist center we heard the waitresses speaking English to other customers. We did order in French, though-without incident, and we then returned to the campground for the night.
It rained all night, and it was still raining when we left the campground this morning. We drove northeastward along the St. Lawrence, stopping briefly at Montmagny for breakfast and Trois Pistoles to buy some groceries. We were all amused by the name of that second town-I'm sure it must mean something other than "three pistols", but we had fun calling it that, anyhow.
The autoroute gives way to a two-lane road about an hour east of Quebec City, and we drove right next to the St. Lawrence for at least another hour. I was here a few years back with Paul and Nancy, and I remember the area being very beautiful then. We could see the pretty countryside near the river and the different shades of blue and green where salt and fresh water came together. Today the entire river was a wall of grey. The rain was sometimes hard and sometimes light, but the fog over the river made it impossible to see more than a few feet in the water.
Before long we came to the city of Rimouski, a pleasant place that was destroyed by a hurricane twenty years ago and rebuilt as a beautiful modern city. I bought the most expensive gas of the trip here-paying 57.9 Canadian cents per liter, self-serve. That's US$1.65 per gallon. I think Quebec must have a particularly high gas tax, since prices were much higher there than in any other province.
We drove on a few miles beyond Rimouski, with the road right next to the river. At this point the St. Lawrence is more than thirty miles wide, and a ferry ride across it would take two hours and forty-five minutes. It was too bad the fog was so thick over the river; I remember looking out at large islands when I was here before with Paul and Nancy.
Rimouski marks the beginning of Quebec's Gaspe (gas-PAY) Peninsula, a beautiful resort area that mixes seaside and forest in the southeast corner of the province. We cut across the edge of the peninsula, following the Matapedia River valley. The road winds through beautiful, gentle mountains with the river always at the side. The surface is good, and I thought it was a very pleasant drive. Brian, towing the trailer with the pickup, was much more bothered by the rain than I was, and didn't have as much of a chance to enjoy the beautiful countryside.
Paul was riding with me at this point, and we had arranged to meet up with Margaret and Brian again at the information center in Campbelton, just beyond the border inside the province of New Brunswick. Margaret and Brian had passed us while I was buying gas in Rimouski, and since we hadn't passed them on the road, I figured they would get to the place before us. As it turned out, we found the information center (at a ski lodge out in the middle of nowhere, far from our road)-with no sign of Margaret and Brian anywhere. We ended up waiting more than an hour before they finally showed up. Apparently we had passed them without knowing it while they were buying gas in a little town in Quebec. The rain and mountains had slowed them down, and they had gotten lost trying to find the information center. The worst thoughts go through your head when you are waiting a long time for someone; I was very glad to see them, and I was certainly glad they were safe.
We drove on from the information center on what appeared to be a two-lane freeway. It had regular exits, like an American interstate, but it was only two lanes wide, with lines marked to indicate where people could pass. The speed limit was 100 km/h, the same as on the four-lane autoroutes in Quebec.
Also like Quebec, this part of New Brunswick is very French. The Acadian people, the original French settlers in North America, seem very proud of their heritage and language. They make up about a third of New Brunswick's population, and they are concentrated in the northeast part of the province. Because they are such a large minority, New Brunswick has taken the step of becoming the only province in Canada to be officially bilingual. EVERY road sign in New Brunswick is written in both French and English, the government is bilingual, and almost all the people speak both languages well. It's the only place in Canada where bilingualism has really worked.
We camped for the night at Younghall Trailer Park, just north of the city of Bathurst. The owner of the campground spoke to us in English (with a very Scottish accent) as we made our arrangements; she then spoke to the next customer in very fluent French. We were right next to Bathurst Bay, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, and we had a beautiful view of the water from our camper. The weather was still untrustworthy, but it was no longer raining steadily. We walked along the beach, and then Margaret and I did the laundry that had accumulated over the past week. Most of the people in the laundromat spoke French-including one most entertaining couple. The husband carefully folded each piece of clothing as he took them out of the dryer. As he put them down, his wife would pick them up and refold them-not really any differently-and then stack them again. It amazed both of us that he put up with it and continued helping. It was spitting rain again as we took the clothes back to the trailer and got ready for bed.
We got off fairly early this morning, again before the rest of the campground was up. I stopped at a convenience store in the town of Richibucto to buy gas and some food to snack on. This town was almost entirely French-speaking, but without really pausing the salesclerk went from speaking to the previous customer in French to speaking to me in English. The brand of gas was called "Irving", a brand we would see over and over in this part of Canada. These stations are literally everywhere-you see them even more frequently than you see Casey's stores in Iowa. Some are convenience stores, some are true service stations, and some are motels or restaurants where gas is really a sideline. All of them, though, are in garish red and white buildings with the name "IRVING" displayed prominently in bold blue letters.
We drove south from Richibucto to the town of Shediac and then eastward to Port Elgin. We then went north a short distance to Cape Tormetine, where ferries depart for the province of Prince Edward Island. We arrived just as a ferry was leaving, so we paid the fare (Can$6.00 for car and driver) and waited in the huge parking lot for the next boat. Since the departures are an hour apart, we decided to kill some time in the cafeteria building at one end of the parking lot. I had just ordered some food when the announcement was made that we should return to our cars, as boarding would commence shortly. I went to the car holding a slice of pizza on a plate, and soon people were directing cars onto the ship. (They start boarding about twenty minutes before departure.) Before long we were ready to sail.
The crossing from Cape Tormetine to Borden, on Prince Edward Island is twelve miles over the Northumberland Strait, and it takes about 45 minutes. The sea was somewhat rough today, and between the rocking of the ship and the thick cigarette smoke inside the cabin, we decided it was more pleasant to walk around on deck. I didn't feel too bad, but I was glad when we docked again.
Prince Edward Island is Canada's smallest province, and it is in many ways its own little world. Former Prime Minister Trudeau described it as having "a unique cultural heritage", and it certainly is different from every other province. An almanac will tell you it is the most densely populated of Canada's provinces-which might make you think it is full of crowded big cities. That same almanac will tell you it is the most rural province-with a bigger percentage of people on farms than anywhere else in Canada. Both of those statistics are true.
The reason they can both be correct is that Prince Edward Island (usually called just "P.E.I." by Canadians) is the only province in Canada without a vast undeveloped forest area. Ontario and Quebec have huge populations, but their density seems lower on paper because of the vast north woods. Even the other Maritime provinces (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) have huge, unsettled interior regions. P.E.I. is all settled, but he settlers are almost all farmers and fishermen. It looks, in many ways, like southern New Jersey-full of tiny farms growing lettuce, potatoes, and berries. New Jersey got the name "garden state" for its truck farming, and P.E.I. could warrant the name "garden province" for the same reason.
There are only two places of any real size on the island. Charlottetown, the capital, has about 25,000 people-it might push a little higher with its suburbs. Charlottetown was the place where the British North America Act, confederating the provinces into the Dominion of Canada, was written. (Rather oddly, P.E.I. was NOT one of the original four provinces, though.) The other "big" place, Summerside, is an industrial town of about 8,000 that reminded me in some ways of my hometown of Mt. Pleasant.
The rest of the province is full of farms growing salad vegetables and potatoes in the bright RED soil. The soil is very sandy and full of iron, which literally "rusts", giving the whole countryside a red color. Every few miles there is a "town" consisting of a general store/post office, a few houses, and occasionally a Protestant church. The United Church of Canada (a combination of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationals) is big on the island, as are the so-called United Baptists. The little white wood church buildings would fit in just as well in the Iowa countryside as they do on Prince Edward Island. The place is very hilly, but the roads (which are universally BAD) run straight up and down the hills. All along the roads there are beautiful wildflowers. Especially prominent are lupines, in white and pink and especially deep purple. They cover the ditches, and sometimes there are whole fields of flowers pouring down the hills. It really is lovely. For no reason I can figure out, the place reminds me of eastern Iowa. It really doesn't look that much like Iowa, but I got the feeling just the same. Perhaps it's the hilly countryside; perhaps it's just that it's the only real farm country we had seen in days-whatever the reason, I felt very much at home here.
The pace of life is slower here than elsewhere in Canada. Take driving, for instance. The roads in P.E.I. are in pitiful shape (!!!), but that doesn't really matter. The local people drive slowly and carefully. In fact, they are some of the most polite drivers I have seen anywhere. Unlike the maniac passers and speed demons in Ontario and Quebec, the Islanders are content to follow at safe speeds and distances. In the towns they will pause to let people out of parking spaces, without immediately pulling into those same spaces. Perhaps this is because there is really no reason to drive fast. The island is quite small (about the size of Delaware), and even at very slow speeds, you can get most anywhere within an hour. Driving, though, is just one aspect of a slower pace of life.
The people in P.E.I. seemed pleasant, but not overly friendly. They get more than their share of tourists (this is, after all, the best beach resort in Canada), but it's quite clear that life would go on perfectly well without the tourist trade. Only in one small stretch (next to the island's best beach) are there the souvenir shops, wax museums, and other tourist traps that are so common everywhere else. Most of the island just ignores the tourists-they are polite, but nothing more-and that's fine with me.
Prince Edward Island did away with billboards a few years ago. In place of them the province erected tiny little signs with green letters on a black background. These are supposed to be more scenic than the billboards, but there are certainly more than enough of them cluttering the landscape. I suppose it is a good idea, though.
Of all the places we went on this trip, Prince Edward Island was my favorite. It's hard to say exactly why, but I think it's because more than anywhere else we went it's a place where I felt right at home-a place where I could enjoy living. I'm no farm boy, and I don't pretend to be one, but I think I could fit in quite nicely in Charlottetown or Summerside.
The first place we went on the island was to the Acadian region, in the southwest part of the province. Here we toured a museum that tried to re-create the pioneer buildings of Mont-Carmel, an early French town in P.E.I. It was somewhat less than overwhelming-all the furnishings had been donated by local people, and only a few of them were actually from the era the village tried to recreate. Much more enjoyable was the modern-day Mont-Carmel. The modern town, a tiny fishing village, fits snugly between two beautiful red sand beaches. Its huge, colorful wood houses where fishermen live and the massive brick church (with twin spires) are really far more interesting than the fake history next door. In place of lawns, many of the houses had wildflowers growing right up to the doors. All the sidewalks (except the one leading to the church) were wood, and the people seem to walk barefoot around town most of the summer. This is definitely NOT a resort area, though. The beaches are beautiful, but they are not considered so great as the ones on the north end of the island. For this reason they are virtually deserted-only a few people, all locals, play on them.
From Mont-Carmel we drove north to the only real resort on the island. Paul, who had seemed so bored for so much of the trip, wanted to see the "Marine Aquarium" at Stanley Bridge on the North Coast. We obliged, and I hope he liked the place-I certainly didn't. It wasn't TOO awful, as tourist traps go, but it certainly wasn't worth the $3.00 admission to see tank after tank of fish and then rooms of stuffed birds. I went through it very quickly and read a newspaper in the car. It really didn't take Paul and Brian much longer, though.
We ate out tonight at an extremely expensive restaurant, also in this tourist trap region. "Chez Yvonne" in the town of Cavendish featured steak and seafood with all the quiet ambience of a truck stop (plastic chairs and paper placemats with advertising). For that charm I paid Can$15.20 (about US$11.50), plus tip, for a small steak I had to send back because it wasn't cooked properly the first time, together with soggy fries, and peas and carrots. That price wouldn't be high at a place with any pretension to atmosphere whatsoever, but it was a rip-off at this place.
The sun was just starting to set as we left Cavendish, and only a mile or so south we left the tourist trap behind and were again in the "real" Prince Edward Island. We drove south and then east to the suburbs of Charlottetown (with quaint names like "West Royalty"), where I bought gas, and then we wound through the city itself on a two-lane road.
Charlottetown is a most peculiar little city. Half of it is old, wood homes painted in conservative colors (but never white) with properly tended yards and gardens-it looks like New England, only more so. The other half is ultramodern: malls, fast food, apartment complexes, and glass office parks. For a long stretch along the highway the old town is to the east and the modern city to the west, with the highway being the dividing line between the two. There is no transition zone at all. The two parts of the city really don't go together at all, but the people go continuously from one part to the other and back without seeming to notice the difference.
Margaret and Brian stopped at an Irving station southeast of Charlottetown, where they bought travel mugs of coffee. Like Casey's, Irving has a deal where you can buy a travel mug and get cheap refills of coffee. The refills cost 19 Canadian cents (about 14 US cents) all over the Maritime provinces. In addition to the cheap coffee, they thought it would be an interesting (and inexpensive) souvenir.
We camped for the night in a provincial park southeast of Charlottetown. The park was right on the coast, but it was dark when we camped, so we didn't bother walking along the water. Margaret and I phoned Marine Atlantic, the company that runs ferry service to Newfoundland to try to arrange reservations for the following night. We found that there was no space available until Tuesday night at one minute before midnight-to arrive in Newfoundland on Wednesday morning. Since we wanted to go to Newfoundland, we reserved space on that ferry and thought of ways we could dawdle to kill the time until then. (As it turned out, we dawdled a bit more than we had planned on.) The lady from the ferry company gave me a confirmation number. I had nothing to write it down with, but I figured I could memorize it. When she started spewing out a long list of letters and numbers I didn't know what to do. In the end we scratched the number with my pocket knife into the back cover of the phone book. I couldn't tell you the number today if you paid me, but you could probably still find it there, at a phone booth somewhere on Prince Edward Island.
This morning we explored a bit more of Prince Edward Island. P.E.I. has three counties named Kings, Queens, and Prince. We figured that, as long as we were here, we should at least say we had seen all three of them. So we made a brief detour eastward into Prince County.
After a half hour or so, we stopped at a tiny little provincial park that is home to a small herd of buffalo. Buffalo are not native to eastern Canada; these were imported from northern Alberta about twenty years ago. They don't really fit into this seaside setting, but they seem to be prospering nonetheless-the herd has doubled since they were brought here. Margaret and I caught a glimpse of some of them, but they ran into the woods before Brian and Paul got there.
We drove back through Charlottetown and then back to the ferry terminal at Borden. It was precisely 10:30 when we arrived, and the ferry workers directed us right up to the dock. They stopped the traffic two cars in front of Brian, and we made a circle around the terminal and parked for an hour. We were among the first to board the 11:30 ferry, which seemed less crowded than the one over to the island. The crossing was more smooth, too.
Back in New Brunswick, we drove southeastward to Shediac, where Brian and I exchanged some more money. The people at the bank spoke mostly French, but the tellers spoke excellent English to us. We got some of the new Canadian dollar coins with the money we exchanged. They really are quite pretty-shiny and gold. The U.S. mint might have been more successful with the "Suzies" if they had made them a different color.
From Shediac we went on westward to Moncton, a city we would get to know only too well in the next few days. Moncton has only 55,934 people (I just checked my atlas), but it acts as if it had half a million. There are no less than eleven exits for the place along the Trans-Canada Highway, plus eight more along provincial highway 15 (the route we took into town). It seems to stretch on forever along all the highways that lead into it, and downtown it is a maze of skyscrapers entirely unlike what I would have expected in a place of its size. Moncton is the smallest of the three places of any size in New Brunswick (Saint John and Fredericton are larger), yet it seems by far the largest.
Brian wanted to buy a souvenir T-shirt from each of the provinces we visited, so we stopped at a mall in Moncton to try to find a place where he could buy one. It was enormous-not exactly a challenge for the one in Edmonton I saw last year (the world's largest), but extremely large and confusing. We walked every hallway, pausing at each clothing, sporting goods, or gift shop to scout it for T-shirts. We never did find anything appropriate, but we certainly killed plenty of time. We were in that mall nearly an hour without really accomplishing anything.
From the mall we drove into downtown, and then we crossed away from the city on a frightening little bridge. It was an ancient rusted green structure with a metal floor and all its support rising above the bridge. It pretended to be two lanes wide, but the lanes were not much wider than my tiny car. The speed limit on the bridge was 20 km/h (10 mph), but needless to say the stream of traffic in the other lane went far faster than that.
The bridge dumped out on a pathetic little road (highway 114) that we followed south from Moncton. All the highway markers in New Brunswick are shaped like that province, and the color of the sign tells you how good the road is. Green highway signs mean relatively good highways; any other color means horrible. Highway 114 was marked with blue signs, which supposedly meant it was of "intermediate" quality. If our road was intermediate, I'd hate to see what New Brunswick calls bad. The road had a terrible surface, it went around tight blind curves and up and down steep hills, it seemed to wind through every little town in the province, and it had places with road construction that came up without advance warning.
In one of the construction zones we saw two sign-turners (why they call them "flagmen", I'll never know) who obviously had no idea what they were doing. When we got there one of them had his sign turned so neither the "SLOW" nor "STOP" side showed toward us. After a time he turned his "SLOW" sign toward us, while the other still had his "STOP" sign out. When the two of them realized their signs disagreed, they finally got things together and gave us the definite "SLOW" signal. I had just taken my foot of the brake when a piece of construction equipment immediately started backing up into our lane. I slammed on the brake again, and the sign-turners just shrugged. After the construction equipment was out of the way I proceeded with extreme caution, figuring the sign boys really had no idea of what was safe.
For as bad as it was, this really wasn't a particularly pretty road. Most of the time it paralleled a tidal river-a river that rises and falls as the tide comes in and out. We saw it at low tide, and it was mostly an ugly red mudflat with some rocks at the side and a trickle of water down the middle of it. At high tide the whole area fills in, from the coast all the way up the river to well beyond Moncton-over 40 miles in all. That must be spectacular, but the land is really quite ugly at low tide-and for the most part the road was in sad shape.
We raced down this awful road at record speed. While we paused in the mall, Margaret and Paul continued driving with the camper. We assumed they had gotten well ahead of us, and we hated to have them wait too long for us to catch up. It turned out when we met that hey had thought we were ahead of them and had also sped down that horrible road trying to catch up. Fortunately they didn't have to wait quite as long as we did at that information center two days earlier.
We met at Alma Beach in Fundy National Park. The Bay of Fundy is famous for being home to the highest tides in the world. The water level can rise 50 feet between high and low tide, and that makes a difference of thousands of feet (and even miles) along beaches and the coast. Seawater backs up in the rivers and at one point causes what is called "Reversing Falls", where the tidewater backs up beyond a major waterfall, making the falls seem to flow uphill. It's difficult to explain exactly why the tides are so high-somehow the shape of the bay constricts the water and forces it up very far very fast. Whatever the reason, it really is spectacular.
Alma Beach doesn't have the highest tides in Fundy (they are across the bay in Nova Scotia), but it was quite a sight nonetheless. We hadn't planned to arrive at any particular time, but we couldn't have arrived at a better one-we got there just as the tide was coming in. When we arrived Alma Beach was a huge mass of rocks and sand, with the ocean far beyond the road. The sand near the road was wet, though. We walked to the beach, and it took us quite a while to actually reach the water. Once we did, we had to keep retreating as the tide kept coming in fast. Within minutes acres of land were swallowed up by the tide. At one point I stood on dry land, well above the water, and within three minutes my feet were wet. Paul waded into the water and reported that only a few feet beyond the shoreline, the water started getting deep. We kept retreating from the ever-rising tide, gathering shells and snapping pictures as we went. By the time we were back in the parking lot, the tide had gotten very close to the road.
We had dinner in the trailer at Fundy and then drove on through the park. There is a short, but beautiful road through the park, and Brian and I saw a deer beside the road as we drove up the hill out of Fundy Park. We looped around on a much better road that went northwest from Fundy and followed the Trans-Canada back eastward into Moncton. Along the road we saw forests in various stages of growth. Green and white signs marking the forests stated when they were planted and when they were to be harvested. The owner of the forests: good old Irving, which this time called itself "the tree-growing company".
Southeast of Moncton the forest turns to marsh. The Trans-Canada then runs past the community of Sackville, a lovely old college town that is one of the most pleasant communities I have seen anywhere. Sackville happens to be the home of Radio Canada International, the short-wave service of the CBC, beaming news of Canada around the world. I drove past the place seven times on this trip, and it's definitely a landmark. Right next to the highway there is a true forest of wires and transmitters-I counted at least fifty transmitters, and I'm sure I missed some. I wonder what their electric bill is.
It was getting rather late when we crossed the border into Nova Scotia (Latin for "New Scotland"). We arranged to meet at an information center right on the border, and this time the information center was quite obvious. Brian and I briefly walked through a museum about the province's blueberry industry, and we picked up some rather awkward maps and travel literature (the maps illustrated in detail what every interchange in the province looked like).
Coming into Nova Scotia there is a string of rather amusing signs. One of the strangest announces "ALL SPEED LIMITS AND DISTANCES ARE METRIC"-a rather silly announcement, considering that all speed limits and distances EVERYWHERE in Canada are Metric, and you have to go through at least one Canadian province to get to Nova Scotia from anywhere. To make things more amusing, right after that is another sign that gives the distance to various cities in Nova Scotia-in BOTH kilometers and miles. Another funny sign says "THIS MEANS SCHOOL ZONE" and has an illustration of the pentagonal sign with children on it that has been the universal signal for school for over a decade. Those signs are found not only all over Canada, but also all over the U.S.A. and in Europe. They happen to be blue in Canada, rather than America's yellow, but that doesn't make them any less recognizable. Why Nova Scotia feels the need to tell us the obvious, I don't know.
After Margaret caught up with us, we drove on about five miles to the city of Amherst, where we found a campground-if you could call it a campground. The place was called "The Barrel", and it was located right on the strip, with K-Mart in one direction, car dealers in another, and an oil refinery down a side street. (What a beautiful, scenic park!!!) Like most urban parks, the place packed in as many campers as possible in the smallest conceivable space. There were no trees, and the buildings at the place looked rather run down. To make things worse, the place seemed unsafe to me. It might not have seemed so bad, but the bathrooms were kept locked, and we had to use a special key to get in them. (It would seem they wouldn't bother with the precaution if there weren't a reason for it.) For all that precaution, the toilets and showers didn't seem to be cared for very well; they weren't at all nice. There was a long list of rules posted in various locations around the park, which appeared to give the owners the right to kick us out if they didn't like us for any reason. (Owners of any park have that right, but most don't feel obliged to mention it.) Being right in the middle of a city, it was well lit all night long, and I didn't sleep very well in the car that night-but it was a place to camp, and at least we were there only one night.
We left camp a little later than usual this morning, figuring there was no particular hurry, since our ferry to Newfoundland didn't leave until a minute before midnight. The drive across Nova Scotia was about five hours, and we figured we would kill a little time in a national park near the ferry terminal.
Brian and Paul got a head start on Margaret and me; we stopped at a McDonalds and bought some coffee and danish. It was amusing to hear the waitress who was attending the drive-through ask us, in a VERY Scottish accent, " 'n' will you be 'aving some 'ash browns with that, now?" This is, after all, Nova SCOTIA. Canadian coffee is always very strong by American standards, and it is always served with LOTS of real cream (two large tubs of cream per cup). The cream is real, and it is loaded with dairy fat. Brian once got some cream that was 18% butterfat, more than is found in some whipping cream. I drink my coffee black, and over the course of the trip Margaret had collected lots of extra creams from me.
I was sipping my coffee as we drove back to Exit 4 and onto the Trans-Canada Highway. We had driven east just a few miles when Margaret noticed the trailer stopped ahead on the road. We assumed there was road construction, even though there were no signs, and I started to slow down. As we got closer, though, we saw Brian standing on the road, and it was clear something was wrong. Brian had had an accident, and the pickup would not move.
The Trans-Canada at this point is one of those silly two-lane interstates I had described earlier. It is rather hilly and cuts through a forest area. The speed limit is 100 km/h (over 60 mph), and there are good, wide shoulders on both sides of the road. Apparently, shortly before Brian got to this spot there was a moose at the side of the road. Several cars had stopped to take pictures of the moose-most of them parked on the shoulder, but at last one van was stopped dead right in the middle of the highway. Another car ... stopped behind the van, also parked right on the highway. Brian could not stop in time, and he rear-ended the car. Very quickly the rest of the cars, including the van that seemed most to blame, disappeared from the scene, and the moose (who seems quite innocent) went back into the woods. Fortunately no one was injured. Paul and Brian had both been wearing their seatbelts (as is required by law all over Canada), and this was definitely an accident where seat belts deserve some credit for keeping them safe.
--2004 David M. Burrow
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