20020623

June 23, 2002

Day 45

Start: Rockwood Park CG, Saint John, NB
End: 
Miles: 0

The high today was 73f in Saint John, New Brunswick and the low was 51f last night. One front came through yesterday afternoon that cooled us at night and during the day. It was still a fairly nice, cool, day until late in the afternoon when it clouded over and the winds picked up. Another front is going through this evening – the winds have shifted to the northwest at about 30knots.

This is our last full day in Canada for this year. Tomorrow, we’ll enter the US at Calais, Maine.

We went out for breakfast to a local place called Mike’s, that was suggested by the campground check-in person. It turned out to be quite nice and served good food and plenty of it. Then we wandered into downtown Saint John, parked, and went to the New Brunswick Museum. It’s a very nice, well done, museum on three floors in a good building with the Convention Center.

The first floor is called the Industry Gallery and concentrates on fishing, logging, and trains. It turns out that New Brunswick had a very active logging era similar to that of Michigan and Wisconsin; it came to an end about the same time, as well. Fishing has always been a mainstay. 

The second floor is split between NB geology and the birds of NB.

The third floor is split between a Decorative Arts Gallery, a Discovery Center, and a New Brunswick Art Gallery.

I concentrated on the first floor, while Dolores did the second and third. I found they had excellent videos on many subjects made from old home movies. This even included loggers breaking up logjams and riding the logs downstream.

Dolores found a man in the NB Arts Gallery who was very eager to explain their holdings. Since she was from Virginia, she had to look at their Gilbert Stuart painting of a woman that was brought to NB when the loyalists left the new United States in 1783. 

The Decorative Arts Gallery contains furniture, china, clothing, and so forth. Dolores noted an exhibit of about two dozen side chairs from the 1850’s and earlier, made by New Brunswick furniture makers. 

We left there in mid-afternoon to travel east for a drive. Dolores had noted a “Fundy Trail” brochure, so we went there. This trail was only completed a few years ago. It is composed of the vehicle road, a graveled trail that runs its entire length, and many side trails. 

So far, it is only 11km long. The plan is to lengthen it to 50km by 2005. It’s currently single-ended, beginning in Saint Martins, NB; the final version will be double-ended. At that time, it will be something like the Skyline Drive in Virginia, that runs along the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The trail runs along the tops of the bluffs along the Bay of Fundy, making occasional excursions to lower places in the stream valleys that run into the Bay. There are many overlooks that provide views of the Bay or of the beaches and headlands along the way. You can see the islands in the middle of the bay entry, and Nova Scotia in the distance. A maintenance person we ran into says he sees occasional moose, bear, deer, and cougar as he travels the foot trail.

At the current end of the trail is an interpretive center at the Big Salmon River. The site once was the home of a logging camp, sawmill, and wharf for shipping the logging products. You can still see the cribbing for the wharf and the underpinning of the sawmill. The center is built to the size of the logger’s bunkhouse and is in the same spot. Many photographs of the place, which shut down in the 1920’s, are on the walls to give a sense of the place as it was.

The trail kept our attention for far longer than we planned. We toured the center and watched their video presentation. We looked out at most of the outlooks. We hiked all over the old wharf area. We also, of course, hit the gift shop.

We finally left and returned the 25 miles to the campground. En route, we stopped to shoot pictures of a large cave that’s been hollowed out by water and wind. Its height at the entrance must be 50 feet. People were going in and out of it, but we decided not to hike to it due to the increasing chill wind.

We had dinner in the little house. Afterward, we put together answers the US customs representative might ask us tomorrow. For instance, we have several bottles of wine that puts us over that import allowance. We’re all right in the other categories.