For pictures from the entire trip click here from this post only here.
Fundy National Park in New Brunswick is where we spent Friday and Saturday of the Labor Day Weekend. Sunday, tomorrow as I write, we will be traveling about 150 miles to a different time zone and a different state of being. We have a spot in Eastport, ME for at least one and possibly two nights. But as always I am jumping the gun. The drive into Fundy was anything but boring, the descents were first gear and stay near the service brakes while swinging the wheel to meet the curves. Tomorrow, Carol will have the pleasure/pain of crawling back up those grades. I suspect that anyone caught behind us will time time for a round of Sudoku or a hand of bridge. We call them disciples, because they are following us for so long.
On our arrival day we walked down into the town of Alma, which claims to have the highest tides in the world. We saw the basin full to the bottom of the bridge and we saw it dry, with a rill of water in the middle. We saw boats high and dry, a long way from the water and the next time we came by they were floating in the same place. While there I bought some scallops to prepare myself. All the restaurants had wanted to cover them cream sauces and over cook them or deep fry them. At Carol’s suggestion I brought home a pound and prepared half by sauteeing them in olive oil and fresh garlic (too much garlic by most people’s standards). They were wonderful. Why do restaurants go out of their way to louse up fine foods?
In the middle of the night the wind came up and the awning I had left up to shelter us from rain started to make noise in the night. At 3 AM I got up and stowed it. Tonight I stowed it as soon was dinner was done. Today’s plan was predicated on a year out of date tide chart! We were given a brochure with a tide chart for Hopewell Rocks showing low tide at 12:51 We spent the morning on a lovely hike along the Salmon River. We arrived at Hopewell at 12:20 to find the tide already rising, low had been at 9:44 AM, and there was a very limited amount of time to play on the exposed seabed. Nevertheless, we paid our admission and took a shuttle to the stairs to the seabed and got out there before the tide had entirely returned. We could see that earlier one could have walked at least ¼ mile out from the fantastic Hopewell Rock formations, we could only just get a hundred feet or so out and that only for a few minutes as the rising tide was covering more and more or the sea bottom driving us back to the higher formations near the stairs we had descended. After we decided we had had enough and the tide decided the rest, we had our lunch at a picnic table and began the return trip. We made a turn off the back road onto a tertiary road to explore a protected shore bird area. At our first stop we met Dale and Norm who clearly were interested in the birds and were from the area. They showed us a walk that took us out to the point where the Spotted Sandpipers where flocking with Semi Palmated Plovers. After spending some time viewing and being eaten by the mosquitoes, we set out for Cape Enrage where there is a lighthouse and other facilities maintained and operated by a teacher from Moncton and 18 past and present high school students as their summer activity. As we got to the lighthouse, there was Dale up in light. He has a key as a member of the local Naturalist Organization and was headed there to give tours of the lighthouse. We had a very nice tour indeed.
Back to Gee 2 for dinner and preparation for travel in the morning.
Please note: if you read the previous posting when it first went up, there was a factual error. I did not find the batteries at the Perlmans “while touring.” While talking to David I mentioned that I could probably fix the lock and he told me I could find the batteries in the top drawer to the left of the large cabinet upon entering the kitchen and that a large white notebook containing instructions for all aspects of operating the house should be found in the bottom of that large cabinet. It was so. Took me three passes through the book to find the necessary brochure because it was on the second or third page and I went by it too fast. The facts have been updated in that posting!