24.) There for a Moment - Bay of Fundy

24th Stop.  I’m doing a lot of traveling this summer, so I’ve decided to share the moments, the places I found unique and special.  I’m calling them ‘There for a Moment’ because as I travel I’m not just experiencing a place, but I’m experiencing that place at that particular time.  If I went back two years later, both that place and myself would be different and I would see and experience it differently.  I want to share these experiences with others so that maybe they will be inspired to see a place they might never have thought would interest them.  Due to my travels I don’t always have instant access to internet, so some of these might be posted on top of each other, my apologies in advance. 

For the most part my plan was to just pass through New Brunswick, but then I heard about a place called the Bay of Fundy and Hope Well Rocks, where the largest tide change in the world occurs.  The people I stayed with in New Hampshire had some pictures of Hope Well Rocks at low tide and with that it became something I needed to do on my list.

New Brunswick was mostly overcast and foggy all the way on my drive up.  Again the border crossing had been pretty easy.  It was a slightly bigger town that I was crossing through so there was plenty of traffic.  On the Canadian side I looked for a money exchange again and apparently those things aren’t really around anymore.  At the visitor’s center they told me to go to a bank and use my debit card and essentially just deal with any fees that I got.  They also said that everywhere accepted card so I didn’t really need cash.  By the way that was a lie, so if anyone is planning to travel into Canada get some cash early on.  Even if you aren’t going to any rural spots the tolls only accept cash, as a second place if you run out of Canadian money like I did they will accept American dollars for the same amount as Canadian which is a bad deal for me. 

The visitor center gave me one of those brightly colored maps that aren’t to scale and told me to take a coastal road to Hope Well Rocks.  I did that but because I did it added about two hours of drive time to my trip and I had to pay a fee to drive through a national park.  I had written down directions I’d looked up the night before which I could have followed but decided to take a locals word on it.  By the way I couldn’t use my phone’s GPS because it runs on data and since AT&T Canadian service only allows me for $30 extra that month to text only, no phone calls or data usage unless I pay extra on top of the $30, I had to rely on directions written down and people to guide me.  I’m good with maps but I didn’t have anything detailed of Canada, so a lot of the time I was hoping that the road drawn with no name on it was actually the one I was on.  Because I was in Canada I had to do quick conversion of speed limits in my mind, 1 km is about 2/3 of a mile.  My car doesn’t have both km and mi on it but after a day or so I got used to it. 

New Brunswick also borders Quebec Province which means that every sign is half in English and half in French, and since I have been trying to learn French for far too long that was pretty cool to see.  Also some of the radio stations were completely in French from the DJs and newscasters to the music.  I really enjoyed that, even if most of it I couldn’t understand, I liked having the option to listen to it. 

I got to Hope Well Rocks during low tide which was my aim.  This way I could walk around on the ocean floor and see what makes this place unique.  Hope Well Rocks is actually large rock formations that have been cut and carved by the sea continually coming in and out creating these fifty foot tall towers of layers rock to free stand with tops of trees and other greenery.  The whole area is dozens of them clustered along the beach, and new ones slowly forming along the cliff face as the water continues to carve them out.  The ground is muddy and sandy, the water brown with silt, but the towering rock formations are something special.  I’d seen pictures of similar formations in Thailand and Vietnam but I had never heard of them being in Canada.  And when I realized that as awesome as they looked in those pictures that they were probably nothing compared to these simply because these are here at the highest tide change in the world, so there was almost no way that those could be as tall.  By the way, I have always wanted to see those formations, so when I was told about this place and when I actually got to see this place it was like I’d just crossed something unexpected from my bucket list. 

I walked down on the ocean floor for over an hour, going as far as I could in both directions down the beach.  I would think I had reached the end then go around another formation to see a whole new beach.  It was a fairly busy place, but I did notice that the further I walked from the main entry down the less people were around.  Most of the people stayed fairly close to the stairs that took us to the ocean floor.  I was definitely fine with that, I was tired of people who wanted to see things but then complained because it was dirty, or too much work to get too.

Afterward I walked up the concrete trail that leads back to the visitor’s center, just before I got there I realized there was another trail that came off going the other direction.  I followed it, this one was significantly shorter and less steep.  It lead to a look out.  On the left was some of the rock formations, on the right was for as far as the eye could see this completely flat sand arm that extended out into the ocean just above the water line.  It was veined with water channels over it, but for the most part looked completely untouched by people.  Completely smooth as it gently rounded down into each stream that stretched across it creating a leaf vein pattern over its surface.  That was pretty cool to see, mainly because it was so unexpected. 

I didn’t get to stay in New Brunswick long but I will say that it is some place I’d like to visit again.  There were long stretches of highway with few exits and when I did exit for gas it wasn’t feet from the on/off ramp it was a little bit of a drive through the country.  Most of what I saw was fogged in landscape, I grew up with that so it was no problem for me and sometimes it is quite nice but I did feel that I missed a lot of the open landscapes that I was passing because of it.  People seemed more reserved in Canada then I had experienced only a few days earlier in Maine.  But they weren’t rude.  New Brunswick was interesting and different enough to peek my interest in going back to see it again, but I don’t know exactly where I would want to go or what I would want to see.  There was something elusively interesting however.