Monday, along the St. John River

August 6th

Cable ferry, Westfield Point

"Uptown" at Saint John, during our breakfast at Cora's again, not very early in the morning, we watched the low cloud begin to lift, but had already booked a third night at the Hilton (at the special holiday weekend rate of $119 per night this was too good an opportunity to miss) and decided to drive around in the rental car for the rest of the day, exploring the lower reaches of the St. John River. Come to think of it, I ought to link this post to my River Diary blog.

As soon as we left the coast road out of town the sky above us was clear and blue: no sea mist beyond the immediate vicinity of the shore, and it was turning out to be much finer than forecast. Our first stop was at Westfield Point at a ferry station at the lower end of a wide stretch of river called Long Reach. The two ferry boats in operation here were operated by cables, a local invention from the 1900s. Its reliability is not perfect*, but in normal weather conditions it works fine. Originally, horses used to haul the cable around the drum, but now it's fully automatic.

* That accident report contains some very interesting information about the Westfield ferry, by the way.

Scenery seen from one of the ferries

Around the tourist information building in the car park, from which country music was being broadcast ––"...drifting too far from the shore ..." on fiddle and mandolin, for instance––several historic plaques told the story of this area. French (Acadian) settlers and British Loyalists had settled here, with co-operation from the native population. When the Loyalists arrived after the American War of Independence (ca. 1784) each family was granted an urban plot at Saint John plus a larger plot up-river. We drove through several of these little communities, hardly any of which had shops, lodgings or places where you could buy food, up the west side of Long Reach as far as Nerepis Marsh, the name meaning "place where the eating is good," presumably a reference to the ducks and fish that still live there.

The old church at Kingston

From the marsh, not finding any other ferry in the vicinity of Hampstead (as marked on my obsolete road map of the maritime provinces) and unwilling to drive as far as the bridge beyond Gagetown on this occasion, we did a U-turn and backtracked to the ferry we'd spotted at Evandale. I'd also spotted some parasols there that hinted at a place for lunch between our road and the river––the Evandale Resort, a riverside inn with mooring facilities for motorboats. After eating there we drove onto the ferry, crossing onto a sizeable peninsula between Long Reach and Belle Isle Bay, an inlet of the St. John. We got onto the wrong road, raising a cloud of dust, and had to turn around again. Someone was tending a magnificent vegetable plot on the hillside. Crossing the water on the longest of the cable ferries at Long Point where a spit of sand pointed into the lake we carried on to a place called Kingston––Westfield ... Hampstead ... Kingston: it sounds like a tour of greater London––where we came upon the oldest surviving Anglican church in New Brunswick, Trinity Church, clad in white clapboard siding. We parked for a pause at the General Store which is about as old as the church (1788), selling Irving Oil (as does every other roadside halt in NB), then drove down another country road back around many curves to the Westfield ferry again.

Sand Cove beach

Time to return to the hotel now, we thought, but we took a wrong turn for the third time and ended up at Sand Cove instead, near the Irving Nature Park where you can hammer at the rocks in search of fossils. The part of the beach we walked along had sandy cliffs eroded by rain; in the distance we could see a container ship anchored out at sea.

After another supper at A Taste of Egypt we walked further through the atmospheric streets of old Saint John, through a rough area with pawn shops and liquor stores. In a park square stood a lonely statue of Samuel de Champlain (who named the Rivière St. Jean) that clearly didn't fit with the statues of Thomas Carleton and Sir Samuel Tilley in King's Square further uphill.

People apart, coming together (detail) by Hooper

The former docklands were being gentrified, it seemed, with new waterfront condos for sale and souvenir shops for cruise passengers. There used to be an imposing customs house in this part of town, a fine piece of architecture to judge from the old photos; it had been torn down in the 1960's to be replaced by concrete blocks with no curves to them; what a shame. However, more recent buildings have given the city quite a stylish, modern look, and the realistic sculptures of townsfolk by John Hooper, such as the group of People Waiting outside Barbour's General Store, are great fun.

People Waiting, by John Hooper (plus me)

Mist along the cliffs

Tonight we have 8 octas of fog, visibility at the airport an eighth of a mile, vertical vis. 100 feet, temperature 20, dewpoint 20, which means that we cannot see a thing from our bedroom window on the 11th floor of the Hilton except by looking straight down; the lighthouse on the dockside adjacent is slightly visible. It reminds Chris of the Fens (of his youth).

Till late afternoon today the sky was blue and cloudless. We ate our breakfast at a Cora's restaurant with toast, eggs and fruit galore. Orange juice and no coffee for me. Then we took the car up the road to Loch Lomond, the lake just past the airport, and beyond. Road 111 leads to St. Martin's, a fishing village at the mouth of the Irish River where the tides rise and fall by as much as 27 feet. We had a long stop there sitting by the harbour, buying icecream. Nothing else for lunch because too many other tourists were parked by the restaurants near the rust-coloured sea caves round the corner, so we carried on up to the Fundy Trail Parkway entrance, 7km further along the cliffs.

The Flowerpot Rock

It cost us $4.50 apiece to enter the park, warmly welcomed by uniformed park wardens. Once in, we stopped at several of the lookouts along the parkway to see the views of the shoreline. At the first one we wandered off for a hour's easy walk on the grassy "Flowerpot Trail" punctuated with lookouts like the road above. The Flowerpot is a thin, tall rock in the bay, eroded at its base by tides and topped with fir trees, very photogenic, as was the Fuller Falls, a delicate waterfall we saw later on, where crowds of people, mostly friendly Chinese families from Philadelphia, were climbing down the ladder steps to the viewing platform, with cables for railings.

The midpoint of our visit to the Fundy Trail was at the mouth of the Big Salmon River where we sat on the beach chewing energy bars before tackling the wooden stairway to the Interpretive Centre on the site of a former saw mill. The old wharf that belonged to it is dimly visible like an underwater ghost in the stony river below.

We drove a couple of miles further along the winding road to a high point (Chris rather anxious about our gears) from which we could see a roll of sea mist forming; it seeped its way in and up through the treetops, coming and going in wisps, mysterious and beautiful.

The parkway and pathways are well labelled with plaques that describe various species of flora and fauna, including ospreys and kingfishers. No sighting of those today, but I did sample the wild raspberries and found cloudberries, too. We drove back to the city along a very lonely back road with the mist, fog rather, now settling in for the night and giving us increasingly blurry views of the mudflats, crossed by covered and uncovered bridges, and endless conifers.

Damp in the cloud and very hungry we relished our supper at A Taste of Egypt up the hill on Union Street. The room was decorated by sphinx and mummy replicas and rows of shisha pipes: chickpea soup with lime juice in it for me followed by Nefertiti's Touch (this was skewered chicken on clove-flavoured rice) with hibiscus tea. Afterwards we looked at the monuments in King's Park (the King being Edward VII--there's a fountain playing in his honour). Saint John was established in 1784, as a Loyalist settlement. We saw one of the original Loyalist houses built on top of a floor of rock.

Down east

Today we flew to New Brunswick, not thinking of the change of time zone until after 8 in the evening when we suddenly realised it was getting late, here.

"PTN departing from Rockcliffe straight out to the east," announced Chris on the airwaves, as we took off with a squawk code from Gatineau Flight Services. Our IFR flight plan was cleared as filed: maintain 5000', direct Lafit, Rabik, CYSC. CYSC is Sherbrooke airport where we have been before, and the waypoints were just triangles on the map, invisible on the ground. It was a hazy, hot day with no lightning strikes within a 200 mile radius. That was lucky. At St. Jean airport (not to be confused with Saint John, today's destination, we crossed the Richelieu River, packed with pleasure boats.

Shadows over the Maine-New Brunswick
border, from 9000 feet up
(our wing strut visible in bottom r h corner)

After a good lunch at the Resto de l'Aeroport at Sherbrooke, we were sent up to 9000'-- it took us half an hour to climb to that altitude and we stayed there, skimming through the tops of the fluffy cumulus clouds for another hour and a half, on the Victor 300 airway towards Millinocket and, before we got there, onto a direct course for another invisible waypoint called MOWND, thence to Saint John. Many wind turbines could be seen in the wilds, besides the usual rivers, lakes and forested steep hills. It was cool and smooth up there, but not so smooth on the descent to warmer air. We could see the estuaries of the rivers that pour into the Bay of Fundy, and Grand Manan Island on the horizon beyond St. Stephen's. It was easy to spot the Saint John airport beyond the city and its harbour, impossible to spot the fact that nobody was around to man the FBO which in fact had been closed for the long weekend since lunchtime. They won't be reopening till Tuesday! We arrived at supper time and had to make a phone call to ask where to park, how to get out of the airport, how to buy fuel before Tuesday. Supplied with answers to all these questions, after the FBO manager's wife had found her husband at home to answer the call, we managed to rent a car and drive into town, past the Irving Oil refinery and an amazing number of petrol stations by the roadside.

Evening view from our window at the Hilton, Saint John

I had booked us a room at a remarkably reasonable rate at the Hilton; what's more they upgraded us on arrival to a room with harbour view, high up and very satisfactory.

We took an evening walk around the town whose heyday was the 1880s, when a third of Britain's sailing ships were built here. The redbrick buildings look old; the hills down to the docks are steep. We sat on a bench on the boardwalk opposite a cluster of fishing boats starting to rise up the harbour wall with the incoming tide and watched a freight train go by. It had 56 carriages, mostly oil trucks.