Saturday 15 September 2001

All day drive, arriving at dusk in Sugarloaf Provincial Park Campground near Campbellton in New Brunswick, one of the three Maritime Provinces (the other two being Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia). This is about the nicest campground we've found for ages: plenty of space, beautiful grounds, spotless restrooms with plenty of hot water.

Sunday 16 September 2001 - Friday 21 September 2001

Walk in the woods in the morning. Lots of interesting fungi, and the leaves beginning to take on their fall colours. We understand that they're at least as good in eastern Canada as they are in New England, and the early signs are promising.

Aiming to get to Prince Edward Island today, but unfortunately after about 100 miles the gearbox on the truck finally succumbed to all the abuse it's taken over the past year and we lost third gear and above. We limped into Bathurst in second gear, discovered that our first choice campground no longer existed, and finally staggered eight more miles or so to Heritage Tent and Trailer Park which fortunately was still there. Nice spacious campground surrounded with trees, and there were only two other campers - Fernand and Edgar - both of whom live locally but keep their trailers there over the summer as a pleasant place to go and relax. They made us welcome and recommended a Chevrolet garage.

Into the garage on Monday morning: got an appointment with their transmission specialist for 8.30pm on Wednesday. They have so much work that they do two shifts, which I suppose must be a good sign. However, it looks as if we'll be here for some time. Did shopping, tried to use internet at library (closed on Mondays), had a drink with Fernand and Edgar at their campfire in the evening.

Interesting info #18: The accent around here is a strange mixture of French, Irish and Scots. We'd expected that the main language beyond Quebec would be English, but locally it's about 40 / 60 English / French although most people are bilingual. I overheard a conversation between two middle-aged men in Tim Hortons; one was speaking English with a few words of French thrown in while the other spoke French with bits of English, but they communicated perfectly naturally and easily. This seems to be quite normal, and you often hear people switch language halfway through a sentence, presumably if they forget a word or think of a more elegant way to express what they want to say. However, be warned: colloquial Canadian French sounds nothing like the Parisian variety you learn at school; apart from the outlandish accent, there's a lot of local dialect and English words thrown in (it's known as 'fractured French'), and I often find it almost impossible to understand. On a few occasions I've had to listen for about a minute to be sure that what people are speaking actually is French and not some obscure variant of Serbo-Croat or Swahili.

Still on the subject of accents: having listened on a number of occasions to Jean Chrétien, the Canadian Prime Minister, on TV and radio, I'm becoming convinced that he's not a native French speaker at all but is just putting it on as an act. He sounds much more like the French knight on Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries. Come back here and I shall taunt you a second time". 

Yet more accents: even outside the French influenced areas, it's possible to recognise the difference between an American and a Canadian accent. The most obvious difference is in the 'ou' sound in words like 'about'; Canadians give this a very Scottish sound, much more like 'aboot'. Unfortunately, Americans from Minnesota and Maine sound similar due to their close proximity to Canada, so it's not foolproof.

So, a few days of enforced inactivity. The weather was unseasonably good and the area is pleasant, so it wasn't too much of a hardship. We drove around the countryside (rented a car after the truck went in for repair), read a lot, ate and drank. On Thursday evening the garage finalised the long list of bits that needed replacing, ordered them, and produced an estimate - $2,200. Gulp. Better than $3,500 for a reconditioned one, I suppose, and at least they're Canadian dollars. As they don't work on Saturdays we assumed that we were likely to be stuck for another weekend, but amazingly enough they finished it at 11.00pm on Friday so we saved a couple of days. Just as well, as most of the campgrounds around here close down at the end of September and the rest do so over the next couple of weeks.

Saturday 22 September 2001

Took our rental car back. They don't work on Saturdays, so we left it with a nice note and walked back to the garage to get the truck. Back to campsite, quick pack up and off we went again.

Still hadn't got to Prince Edward Island as dusk was approaching, so we stopped at a small unmanned campsite - Parc Acadien at Cocagne - who trusted you to put your money through the postbox in the front door. In the evening we drove into nearby Moncton, one of the biggest towns in New Brunswick, but it was uninspiring so we didn't stay long. You can see the tidal bore which comes up from the Bay of Fundy here, but it was scheduled for 3.20am so we didn't bother. Got a takeaway from a promising looking little Vietnamese restaurant which advertised itself as being organic and MSG-free, but it turned out to be very ordinary bland Chinese style food. 

We took very few pictures of New Brunswick. It's an attractive, wooded province but with nothing particularly photogenic; however, here's a gratuitous photo of some pretty autumn leaves on our campsite ...

Tomorrow we shall make it to Prince Edward Island.

Wednesday 10 October 2001 - Thursday 11 October 2001

Packed up in high wind, and continued along the Fundy Trail Coast Drive. This is beautiful but its roads are appalling: narrow and virtually unmaintained, causing us and the poor old trailer and its contents to be shaken about unmercifully. Pretty small villages, but most of the properties and farms don't seem in very good repair; I suppose this is the economic equivalent of the nicer but poorer parts of Scotland. At Amherst we ate lunch while the truck was being serviced at Canadian Tire (unfortunately they don't spell everything properly). Crossed into New Brunswick in the afternoon, at which point the road becomes the Fundy Coastal Drive. The campsite which we were making for at Alma turned out not to exist any longer, so we went into the one in Fundy National Park: very pretty, but the water had been turned off for the winter.

Next day we went for a brisk coastal and woodland walk, featuring lots of mushrooms and red squirrels and a woodpecker. Lunch in Alma at one of the two remaining places that were still open, and even this was due to close the next day. After lunch we drove to Point Wolfe where they have an American style covered bridge ...

... which originally dates back about 100 years to when the area was logged, but it was refurbished in 1992 which accounts for its good condition. We tried to have another walk, but it was just too cold and windy so we gave up and spent the rest of the day indoors reading.

Friday 12 October 2001 - Saturday 13 October 2001

Went for a couple more walks in  the morning before leaving the Park: boardwalks through the woods ...

... up to a waterfall, and into a little area called the Devil's Half Acre due to its spooky feel - lots of mossy rocks and crevices, old fallen trees etc. Lunch in Alma at what was now the only remaining functional restaurant, which not surprisingly was doing a good trade, followed by a walk out over the vast rocky beach left at low tide. In the afternoon we drove through Saint John, which was shrouded in fog and hence virtually invisible, and followed the St. John river to Fredericton, the provincial capital. We stopped at the Hartt Island Campground, which is neither on nor overlooking Hartt Island. Virtually all its facilities had been closed down for the season - we even had to register ourselves - but that didn't stop them charging the full rate.

The anthrax scares seem to be reaching an all-time high. It hasn't taken the assorted terrorists, idiots and loonies out there long to realise the amount of trouble you can cause by sending an envelope of sugar through the mail, and of course the only ones they're catching are the most inept and inadequate.

Next day we went into Fredericton, a pleasant little place with some well preserved early 19th century buildings and a nice statue of a mountain lion ...

The art gallery is very impressive: more so than you would expect from a place this size, largely due to the largesse of Lord Beaverbrook who was from round here. Some good 15th and 16th century pieces, three Dalis, and a large but incomprehensible installation featuring ... Lord Beaverbrook.

Tomorrow we have to cross the US border into Maine for the first time since the terrorism, so we'll be leaving plenty of time for them to dismantle our vehicles and pull on the rubber gloves to probe our orifices for Semtex.

In the morning on the way to the border we called in at Nackawic, partly for a supermarket and a Tim Horton's (neither of which it had) but mainly because it's the home of the world's largest axe. I bet you didn't even realise that there was such a claim, but there is and it's here ...

It's purportedly a monument to all of Canada's lumberjacks, but is really a means of attracting tourists to an otherwise inconsequential town. Unfortunately it doesn't work, as we didn't see another human being in the whole place.

Ok, Maine here we come. One nice surprise - just before the border there's a duty free shop at which we were able to fill in a form and get an instant cash refund of the CAN$172 sales tax on the parts for the truck repair, as well as a bottle of cheap gin. Much better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.