(click on map to enlarge)
States & Provinces visited on this segment: New Brunswick
Dates: Saturday July 21 to Sunday, July 22
Miles driven: 390 (5953 total to date)
Summary: We left our campsite Saturday morning and headed south on highway 2. Shortly after lunch we arrived at Kings Landing Historical Settlement, ~30 minutes west of the Fredericton. Kings Landing is an open air living history museum. It is a restoration of a typical village in the Saint John River Valley in the mid 19th century. The settlement includes buildings moved to the site primarily from the local area prior to a dam being completed in the 1960’s that would have flooded the structures, but some were moved form other areas of New Brunswick. The settlement is spread out across ~300 acres, and includes (among other things) working water powered saw and grist mills, a print shop, blacksmith shop, cabinet making shop, numerous houses and farm buildings, an inn, and a couple of churches. Staff dressed in period costumes do demonstrations of various trades as well as perform routine household work using tools/methods from the mid 9th century. It was very interesting and well done – highly recommended if you are in the area. We spent the rest of the afternoon at Kings Landing until the closed. We then found a campground on the outskirts of Fredericton, and went into the capital city and walked around the downtown area next to the river that evening.
On Sunday morning we packed up and continued east, heading to Hopewell Cape on the Bay of Fundy. We had checked the tide tables when we entered New Brunswick and were able to time our arrival to coincide with low tide. The Bay of Fundy has some of the largest tides in the world, 40+ feet difference between low and high tide. At Hopewell Rocks Ocean Tidal Exploration Site the ocean tides have carved interesting shapes into the rocks along the shore. At low tide you can walk on the beach around the rock formations. At high tide you can rent kayaks and paddle around the rock formations. It would have been great to experience the site at both high and low tides, but we only had time to experience the site at low tide. The kids enjoyed walking and playing in the mud (most of the tidal flat is either rock or mud, not sand). The kids even somehow convinced a random man walking by to shake their hands when they were covered with mud. They were just joking but he went along with it and shook their hands. After leaving Hopewell Cape we drove back north to Moncton, and then SE to Sackville where we camped. We spent 3 nights in Sackville, using it as a base to take day trips without the trailer to Price Edward Island and Nova Scotia.
Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/bryan.vacation/Part10NewBrunswick
Other notes: For its population base, New Brunswick had by far the best road infrastructure of anywhere we visited in Canada. Highway 2 from the Québec border in the NW corner all the way down to Nova Scotia in the SE corner was a new or very well maintained 4 lane freeway. Likewise highway 1 down along the southern part of New Brunswick was a 4+ lane freeway all except the last 100 or so km heading into Maine. Even some of the roads heading off in other directions appeared to be nice 4 lane freeways. This was very surprising since most of the areas we drove through in New Brunswick were very sparsely populated and the total population of the province is less than 1M people. The New Brunswick roads were in sharp contract to those in Ontario. 95% of the road that we traveled from Sault St. Marie to Ottawa were 2 lane undivided highway. The Ontario roads were in general well maintained, and there were frequent passing lanes, but there was almost no divided highway despite the fact that we were in much more densely populated areas (Ontario population is 11+M) and that part of the route we took is the major west-east route across Canada. There was also very heavy traffic on the roads in Ontario, and the roads in New Brunswick had very light traffic. For some reason there appears to be a big difference in priority placed on transportation infrastructure in the two provinces. The other provinces we were in were somewhere in between Ontario and New Brunswick.
Next up: Prince Edward Island
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