Pick Up Your Trash

 July 12

Pick Up Your Trash!

This morning, Doug Emma and I headed into St. John, New Brunswick. Our first stop was at Place Fort Latour. It was a small representation of what the larger fort looked like. We had a long and fairly detailed conversation with a woman named Bernadette who does the bread baking there.

Because of our in-depth conversation with Bernadette she ended up burning the bread. Totally our fault but we certainly appreciated her taking the time to share the history of the fort and her knowledge of the time period.

One of the things that she was baking was fish. Traditionally they would have taken the entire fish covered it in a batter and then popped it into the oven. It was a bread batter so it is a baked fish. She used a simple fillet and lots of seasoning inside of her better. It certainly smelled and looked delicious.

We spent a good part of the day exploring the city of St. John. We managed to find a decent parking spot in the downtown area and after being helped by a local we were finally able to figure out how to use the parking meter. We explored the Saint John market for a bit of time. It is the longest operational market in Canada.

We had heard about a container village. It appears to be a shopping district that is completely made from shipping containers. It is down by the waterfront, unfortunately it was not open when we walked by. So, we continued on our way.

We noticed that a lot of the buildings were well over 100 years old. We were curious about their construction so we walked up a block to what appeared to be a main street from the 1880s. As it turns out a significant fire destroyed much of the city as the buildings were all wooden construction in the 1800s. The result was a boom of stone buildings built in the 1880s and 1890s that continue to stand today.

One house that escaped the fire is now a museum run by the local heritage foundation. It is called the loyalist house. We went on a brief tour through the home and learned about the loyalists who came north following the American revolution.

Of course, our day could not be complete without visiting the reversing falls not once, but twice. We were lucky to visit it at slack tide initially, this is when the St. John river and the bay of Fundy are at the same height and the water by the rapids appears to be completely flat and the river is somewhat navigable. We returned later in the day at low tide to see the water rushing down the St. John river into the bay of Fundy creating eddies and whirl pools. The plan is to return to see high tide when we are able.

We were disappointed to discover that our extension cords would not plugged in at our campsite as we did not have an RV plug. So we made plans to have our dinner at the beach and use one of the beachfront shelters to plug in our two burner stove to make dinner. Upon our return to the campsite, we stopped at the office to buy a bag of ice and that is when I discovered that they will loan out the adaptor for your site. This was a tremendous relief and surprise. It meant that we could have dinner on our own site.

After dinner we went for a walk down to the beach and discovered it was low tide. The size of the beach was incredible as we had a chance to view it earlier in the day during high tide. I can’t even begin to estimate the distance but it was well over 50 m of beach that had suddenly appeared. Unfortunately, so had a lot of garbage. We picked up garbage and plan to pick up garbage at low tide whenever we are able to get to the water.