New Brunswick — Second Installment

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As we fell asleep in the old man­sion in Fred­er­ic­ton, the rain started. We could hear it pitter-pattering on the roof and the win­dows, and church bells in the dis­tance. We slept long and deep. In the morn­ing, we had break­fast in the par­lour, and chit-chatted with other vis­i­tors – a man and a woman on sep­a­rate busi­ness trips, a young Toron­ton­ian who was check­ing out the Uni­ver­sity hop­ing to attend in the fall, and a physics pro­fes­sor in his 60’s who was in town for a math conference.

After break­fast, we packed up and headed out into the pour­ing rain, and South to Saint John. Saint John is much big­ger than Fred­er­ic­ton, seems more like a city than Fred­er­ic­ton – though Fred­er­ic­ton is the cap­i­tal. Strange, but true. We walked around the old part of town and took some pic­tures, but it con­tin­ued to rain and rain and rain. We vis­ited the Old City Mar­ket, which is appar­ently the old­est continually-operating mar­ket in North Amer­ica. Here, we bought a lunch of fish ’n’ chips. We couldn’t resist. And why would we want to?

After this, we headed back out into the rain and decided it was time to find a place to stay. We read sev­eral very pos­i­tive reviews about the Home­port His­toric Bed & Break­fast (www.homeport.nb.ca), and decided to try to get in there. Lo and behold, the last-minute-travel Gods smiled upon us again. This B&B was orig­i­nally a pair of man­sions built side-by-side for ship-building broth­ers, over­look­ing their ship­yards below. The hosts are a won­der­ful friendly pair, Karen & Ralph. We were espe­cially tick­led to learn that they’ve owned a few VW vans over the years, and even trav­eled Europe for a year in one in the 80’s. They also lived in Cal­gary for 16 years – but the East Coast is home, and they seem to love what they do now, because they do it very well! Right down to the details – we had a steam trunk in our room, that had a lit­tle write-up on its his­tory – what ship it trav­elled over on, and when… Absolutely fascinating!

Once we got our­selves a room here, we each had a bath (to warm up after all the wan­der­ing in the rain) and I fell asleep for about 4 hours! Appar­ently I hadn’t quite recov­ered from the all-night travel yet!

We would have liked to stay longer in Saint John – it has a really inter­est­ing old feel to it. It’s one of those places where every brick seems to have a story to tell – some­thing I’ve only really seen/felt in Europe.

On Fri­day, it was time to head North for Steve & Julia’s Wed­ding. We didn’t have time to mean­der up to Monc­ton and see the Hopewell Rocks etc, so we’re think­ing of head­ing back south again tomor­row (after the wed­ding). It now looks like we’ll take a ferry over from Saint John to Digby (South­ern Nova Sco­tia), and work our way from South to North…

But as you all know, our plans may change.

At the moment though, I just noticed that we need to go get ready for the wedding!

We’ll check in again when we can!

Oh, and since we already have one photo of Brian-in-a-hat here, why not toss in another? We were at a pizza place with the wed­ding party and their fam­ily last night… Origami ensued…