Chapter 2: New Brunswick
July 3 - July 24, 1997
As I write this, I'm looking out the trailer windows to a view of the Bay of Fundy on three sides. We're right on the beach, although currently a long way from the water, since the tides here are something like 30 feet high, and it's now low tide. Tendrils of fog are drifting in off the water, and the point to the south of us has disappeared entirely into the fog. We can hear a foghorn hooting periodically, somewhere in the distance.
So we really feel like we've reached our first travel objective - we're unmistakably immersed in the atmosphere of the Canadian maritime provinces. I've been playing the Mendelssohn "Scottish Symphony" and "Hebrides Overture" on the stereo - somehow, the music seems to match the scene. We're in the little village of St. Martins, about 40 miles east of St. John New Brunswick. We'll probably stay here a week before moving on toward the northern tip of Newfoundland (which is still 900 miles away, including 110 miles of ferry.)
We arrived at Century Farm Family Campground, St. Martin's NB, in the late evening of July 3. This is a new campground, in its first full year of business. There are only a few other RV's here and we had our choice of many sites - all pretty much identical. It's strange not to hear fireworks - doesn't seem like Independence Day. We planned it that way - staying in the US until after the Canadian July 1 holiday, then getting out of the US before the weekend of the 4th, when every campground would be filled to overflowing.
I was awakened by a thunderstorm at 6:30 AM on the 4th - so I guess we got some July 4 fireworks after all. We're in a very different setting than previous campgrounds. The campground is flat and grassy - not a tree in the whole place. The campsite appears to be only a few feet above the high tide mark - I hope that no tsunamis are scheduled this week. The wind is from the South - coming in off the bay rather violently at times. I've just rolled up our awning, which was flapping vigorously in the gusts, rocking the trailer on its springs.
Helen spent quite a bit of time talking to the campground owner, Byard Moran when she went over to do laundry last night. They have just opened the campground - this is the first full year. The land, currently 100 acres, has been in his family since 1783 - a government grant to Mathias Moran. The "homestead" is an impressive building, built by carpenters hired from the nearby shipbuilding yards. The ceilings were painted by artists from Italy brought over by some of the 500 sailing ships that were built near the beach adjacent to the campground. Mr. Moran is now restoring the building with the intent of opening it to tourists in the future. There are several other impressive mansions in the village, apparently all built by wealthy ship builders or ship owners in the 1800's. A railroad line used to come down to the beach, right where the campground access road is now. At one time, they were filling railroad cars with rocks from the beach and selling them to Prince Edward Island for road building. Prince Edward Island apparently has no suitable rock.
The campground has full hookups with 30-amp service, and we're paying $14.40 Canadian, which is $10.67 per night US, including tax. This price includes a 10% discount that they seem willing to hand out for just about any excuse. The bathrooms are clean and have soap dispensers and paper towels. The showers have unlimited hot water, for free. The laundry room has ordinary home-style machines - no coins, with a box of laundry detergent and a box of Bounce sheets sitting beside the machines. You use the machine, the soap, etc, and then pay in the office - $1.00 per wash, $.25 per measure of soap, etc.
The road we're on comes to an end a few miles beyond the village. To travel the 35 miles from here east to Fundy National Park, one has to detour quite a ways inland to Sussex. A road along the coast is under construction now, and Mr. Moran is speculating as to how it will affect his business.
There's a small harbor at the other end of the village, where a stream comes down from inland. Yesterday evening, we explored the harbor area at low tide. I'd estimate that the tide here is about 30 feet, so the harbor consisted of an empty rock and mud basin, with a small stream flowing down the center. Half a dozen 30' fishing boats were sitting on the mud, propped upright by wooden supports. At the mouth of the harbor, wave action has cut two large caves into the rock bluff - a local tourist attraction, accessible only at low tide. The beach all along here and down past the campground consists entirely of rounded stones, generally between 1 and 3 inches in diameter. There is an amazing variety of rock types represented, mostly debris brought from elsewhere by the glaciers. Helen started picking up interesting rocks, and we both immediately thought of Lucille Ball in "The Long, Long, Trailer", stuffing every nook and cranny of the trailer with the biggest rocks she could carry as souvenirs from each place they stopped. I suggested that we each limit ourselves to one 3-ounce rock, replacing it whenever we found something better. Alternatively, we could ship a box of rocks back to Nagels periodically, for storage until we stop traveling.
The campground staff, after our usual story about needing to download our Email, didn't volunteer their office phone - I'm not sure they even realized that their own private phone could do what I asked. I didn't push it. We wandered into the small village nearby, looking for phone possibilities and found a little local tourist information building. We went in, gave them the usual story, asked if they knew where there might be a modular phone available in town, and they immediately volunteered their own phone. Worked fine! We'll probably go back tomorrow to send this mail.
In this same village, we saw a flyer advertising their community Internet access project. The computer lab in the local school is available to the public for a $20 per family per year membership fee. Non-members can use the lab for $2.00/hour. They have a room full of Macintosh machines on a local area network connected via a 56kb leased line to some local ISP. I couldn't figure any way to use it to get my mail off the net onto my PC, although I may go back to do a little net browsing and newsgroup reading next week. They had one lonely modular phone in the office, and after a little prodding, agreed to let me use it. Didn't work! Apparently, the school has a digital PBX, totally incompatible with most modems.
We took a long walk in the late afternoon, near low tide - south down the beach toward Quaco Head. It was about two miles along the beach, some of the time on a path between the beach and an extensive salt marsh, other times near the water on the tidal flats. The salt marsh was at one time diked and cultivated (primarily for hay). The dikes are still visible, but are no longer maintained and have been breached in many places by small tidal streams. When we reached the point, we found interesting caves and a freestanding "flowerpot" rock, perhaps 50 feet high, with a solitary spruce tree on top. We worked our way inland along the rocks and then followed a jeep trail out to a road which went further inland around the salt marsh, and back to camp, with perhaps another three miles of walking. The roadside flowers are everywhere - daisies, lupines of several colors, a glossy yellow "buttercup" which we haven't identified, occasional clumps of blue flag iris, and many more. The marsh grasses are shades of chartreuse and green, in front of the intensely blue ocean background. The wild roses are in bloom and smell wonderful. Some of the lilacs are still in bloom here.
7/7 Today's destination was St. John. We visited Walter and Margaret Ann Nagel, who live in a wonderful old house on the waterfront a few miles east of St. John. They retired here from New York City, many years ago. Subsequently, they had the house moved back 50 feet or so from the edge of the cliff - continuing to live in it during the entire process, which took six months. Margaret Ann grew up in this area, descended from the Carters, one of the original loyalist families who settled here in the late 1700's. While there, I downloaded our Email (very slowly - the St. John local number is only 9600 baud, and felt much slower), and amazed them by reading them a note from Kathy, their daughter-in-law, written two days earlier in Paris. Walter observed that the Internet had changed the whole rationale for the RV life: He noted that in the past, one was likely to hit the road to get away from something; now, with Email, one can become a nomad and still retain ties with family and friends. Thus, modern nomads are likely to have quite different motives - going toward something rather than away from something.
We spent the afternoon in St. John, touring the Loyalist House, built by the Merritt family in 1811. We looked for a postcard picture of the house, to send Helen's sister and brother-in-law Joy and Bob Merritt. After a little shopping, we spent the rest of the day in the New Brunswick Museum, enjoying their extensive exposition of the early life in New Brunswick - shipping shipbuilding, lumbering, and early industry. They have a large collection of "portraits" of sailing ships from this area, including quite a few that were built on the beach where we are currently camping. The life of a ship was surprisingly short - probably averaging less than 10 years. Few of them died of old age - most were wrecked - driven ashore in storms, or "lost at sea". We were reminded of our walk through the cemetery in St. Martins, about 100 yards from our campground, where we saw many tombstones in memory of people lost at sea. In one case, two adjacent stones memorialized two entire families lost at sea. The museum also has a large collection of New Brunswick art - including a few pieces that we really enjoyed seeing. The science section had an interesting exposition of whaling, and a large collection of locally collected fossils.
7/8 This morning, I stood on the beach at low tide, feeling isolated in the fog, watching the flood begin. It came up at over an inch per minute. The slope of the tidal flats was very gentle, so I had to take a step back two or three times a minute to stay out of the water. And here, the tide is only 27 feet! At Fundy National Park, it is 48 feet. And the tourist brochure mentions a place on the Nova Scotia side, up in the end of the Bay, which claims that they once had a tide of 110 feet - apparently during a major storm.
According to Map'n'Go (a pc program containing street maps for all of the US and, with less detail, Canada), the "old" road continues on from the end of the "new" road, a few miles from our campground, to Fundy National Park - another 40 miles or so. The best paper map we have found (the New Brunswick government road map) doesn't show this road at all. We decided to believe Map'n'Go, which listed the road as a "major Forest Road", and started down the road. It gradually deteriorated to about the quality of some of the forest logging roads we've explored in the USA - barely wide enough for two vehicles, full of potholes, occasional boulders sticking up through the surface. Most of the time we were traveling between 20 and 25 mph, occasionally much slower. All went well until we started down into the Salmon River valley. This section was being rebuilt, and the surface was awful. We stopped to talk to one of the construction crew, who said we could continue on - and that 4-wheel drive vehicles had no problem fording the river, which has no bridge. Unfortunately, we don't have 4-wheel drive! Map'n'Go neglected to mention the lack of a bridge.
Quaco Head, a few miles south of our campground, provides a spectacular view. Half of the foundation of what I imagine was a lighthouse was visible at the edge of the cliff, the other half long gone. We could see a few bricks among the rocks at low tide. A small modern concrete automated lighthouse and foghorn, sits well back from the edge. Some small offshore islands - mostly submerged at high tide and having no foliage, were noisy nesting grounds for several species of birds. (We had our binoculars, but didn't have our bird guide with us). Flocks of yet more kinds of sea birds were swimming over the shoals between the point and the islands. A hiking trail began here and roughly followed the cliff edge on around Quaco Head. The trail was mostly in dense forest, occasionally coming right out to the edge of the cliff for a view. The forest felt like a tropical rain forest, apparently due to the frequent heavy fog. There was also a slope down from higher ground inland, with impervious rock not far underneath, so the ground was quite moist, with small sphagnum moss beds visible. The trees were mostly spruce and fir. Very dense clumps of ferns crowded the trail. Tree trunks were almost totally covered with lichens. The lower branches of the trees were festooned with something that looked exactly like the Spanish moss we've seen in Florida, the maps says that the arctic pack ice comes this far south in March!
The simplicity and frontier feel of rural Canada is refreshing. When a trail leads to the edge of a sheer cliff, there were no barriers and no warning signs. Although much of the land in this area is privately owned, we have seen practically no "posted" or "keep out" or "no hunting" signs. Fences exist only where necessary to enclose grazing cattle. Our campground is on an ocean beach, yet I saw not a single warning sign. The signs which are ubiquitous in the US, such as "no lifeguard on duty" and "swimming only in designated areas between the hours of ..." "children may swim only when two responsible adults are present", etc., are almost never seen. Apparently, Canada assumes that people will exercise a little common sense and take a little responsibility for their own actions.
7/9 We left early to drive to Fundy National Park, hoping to do a little beach walking at low tide in the morning, then look over other parts of the park. We actually went 10 miles north of the park, to a beach which was reputed to have good shelling. We drove along the top of an old dike part way across a salt marsh, then hiked out to a couple of miles of gradually sloping beach, where we walked far out to the water's edge, and walked back and forth examining shells (very few), several kinds of seaweed, and interesting rocks, while slowly getting pushed back by the incoming water. There is a slow ground swell, invisible, except that the tide advances in little rushes, then pauses. I tried to measure the period, without much success. It's between 30 seconds and one minute.
Later, we looked around the little village of Alma, just on the northern edge of the park, drove to a scenic lookout for lunch, walked a trail which followed a stream past numerous small waterfalls, and then drove north again to Cape Enrage, where an old but still operational lighthouse sits on a very narrow point jutting out into the bay. Although there was a bit of fog, we could see some of the Nova Scotia shore. The tide was ebbing, and there was a substantial current running past the end of the point - the rocks had bow waves.
7/10 The mail came today - a thick packet, including letters from family and our first on-the-road bank statement and credit card bill. We spent most of the day going through this material. FedEx International delivery works - I called Monday afternoon and the mail arrived Wednesday morning. Since we're a long way out in the boondocks, FedEx lost money on this one. We're told that US mail can take up to 10 days to get delivered to Canadian rural destinations - and that the problem is with the Canadian mail system, about which everyone here complains.
7/11 We packed up and drove to Amherst NS, to the Loch Lomond RV park. This is a fairly large place, and seems to have been established for a long time - lots of little improvements. Most of the sites have concrete patios about 10 feet square. Overall, the park is quite attractive, with a view out over a small lake. The negative is that we're within sight and hearing of a major highway, so we hear the big trucks, 24 hours a day.
7/12 Drove to Joggins, about 15 miles south of us. On the way, we passed one of the well-known tidal bore watching places, but apparently missed the bore by about five minutes - the water was already flowing peacefully upstream. . We spent a while in a private fossil museum. The museum's founder, who spent much of his life collecting the specimens, was on hand and anxious to talk about them. Helen watched while a small boy brought in a bag of fossils from the beach. The guy patiently went through each item, explaining what it was. Later, we drove down to the beach under the fossil cliffs, and spent an hour or so hunting fossils. We found several nice "horsetail" specimens and various unidentifiable plant fragments.
Next day, we tried to find a museum in Sackville. Except that Map'n'Go misplaced Sackville. It was shown on the map as a mile or so north of the highway exit. In fact, it is a mile or so south - the other way down the highway. Just one more example of how bad the map is in Canada. Our GPS track often diverges from the road by up to half a mile, whereas in the US, is usually agrees to within the normal GPS error (100 feet or so).
7/14 We made reservations for a raft trip on the Shubenacadie River, near Truro, and for a nearby campground, for July 23 - at the highest tides for the month. Then, after some shopping, we drove to Valleyview Provincial Park at Bridgetown NS. They don't take reservations but, when I called, said they had lots of space and our long rig would not be a problem. The Trans-Canada highway was rough with many dips near Amherst, but improved as we approached Halifax. We tried a shortcut via major provincial road 14, but it proved too rough. Helen got her first time at backing up the trailer as we turned around. Dave got his first time at using the walkie talkie to guide her.
"Lots of space" was an understatement. The park has 35 campsites, spread across 134 acres. When we arrived, there were three other campers. One or two more arrived during the evening. We have an isolated site in the woods, high on a ridge overlooking the Annapolis River valley and the pretty little town of Bridgetown. The next nearest camper is out of sight and hearing. Up the hill a bit further is a lookout, where they have cleared the trees and installed several park benches, facing east over the valley. We made a quick trip over the ridges to the ocean shoreline just to get our bearings, and were then happy to go back to the campsite. We walked up after sundown and enjoyed the view while watching the first stars pop out.
7/15 The first stop today was the tidal generating station at Annapolis Royal. This is a 20 MW electrical generator powered entirely by the tides. It will operate on a water head of only 1.6 meters. The tide fills the area behind the dam, then, as soon as the tide falls 1.6 m., the turbine begins operating. The reservoir gradually falls, while the tide falls faster, then begins to rise. When the rising tide comes within 1.6 m. of the reservoir, the generator stops. This gives a total of something like 8 hours of generating time per day. Water flow through the turbine is 14,500 cubic feet per second - about half the average flow of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon if I remember right. They also described a dual-cycle system, where the turbine blades change pitch and the water can run both ways through the turbine, which would give a cycle nearly twice as long. The plant has been operating since about 1983 and is a technical success. It is still the only such plant in North America and another is not likely to be built soon because of the large capital investment and long payback period. A full size system could be built across Minas basis portion of upper Fundy, and would use 128 of these turbines generating several times the power needs of Nova Scotia, exporting power to the entire Northeast region. We've been told that when the tide rushes into the Bay of Fundy, the entirety of Nova Scotia moves about six inches.
The historic gardens in Annapolis Royal are an impressive sight. The gardens are large, and very well kept. Several sections are designed to be replicas of gardens as they might have existed at particular periods in Nova Scotia history, starting in the mid-1600's. Other sections of the garden collect historic varieties of plants. The largest such collection was the rose garden, and it was probably the most impressive rose collection we've seen. It's not limited to historic plants - there are also examples of many modern roses. Unlike many other rose gardens there are relatively few tea roses, and a much greater representation of bush and climbing roses of many types. They had examples of many of the original species roses from which all modern roses were bred.
Soon after entering the gardens, we stumbled across a special tour organized by a local group, led by the curator who has done all the design and supervision of the garden for many years. We followed this group around for the entire afternoon - about three hours of continuous lecture. Tim seemed to know the name of every plant in the entire garden. He spouted enormous quantities of information and Latin names were easier for him than popular. Found out that the English Oak was brought by the earliest colonists, partly because it's acorns are good for feeding pigs, and has nearly naturalized here because it can tolerate some saltwater. The gardens are in zone 6a, more moderate than Rochester. Tim pointed out many rare specimens that we would have missed on our own. Many of his current experimental plantings are somewhat hidden, behind other plantings, until they prove successful, at which point they will be moved, or other plants will be moved to expose them. Tim pointed out a special maple, which he obviously valued. It was a striped maple, acer pennsylvanicum, which seemed strange to Dave and me as it is nearly a weed tree, small and not very useful or pretty, in Pennsylvania and New York. This part of Nova Scotia still has many mature American Elms. We saw a spectacular weeping American Elm - a huge and beautiful tree. The director mentioned that there is a new fungicide and a new injection method that shows promise in preventing, or even curing, the Dutch Elm disease. He also showed us a healthy American Chestnut, about 15 feet high, propagated from a new strain that is supposed to be disease resistant.
Incidentally, many of the wild roses we've seen here, as well as in Maine and New Brunswick, are beautiful and fully worthy of a place in a cultivated garden.
In the late afternoon, we came back to the campground, bought a bundle of firewood, and spent a quiet evening. The firewood bundle was almost bigger than I could lift, nicely dried and split, and cost $2.00. Later, I walked back into the woods and discovered that I could have picked up an adequate supply of dry wood without walking very far. Apparently, they sell the wood so cheap that there is little incentive for campers to collect their own. We broiled polish sausage and toasted buns (bread, not ours) over a nice bed of coals. Helen assembled an unusually good potato salad, and a fresh strawberry shortcake, and we had a feast beside the fire. This is the first evening that has felt like "camping". The park ranger stopped by to chat. He reminded us of Gomer Pyle. He had that general appearance and personality, pronounced 'red' as 'rhe-add' and has a high pitched voice and cackling laugh. It's not cold here at all His daughter is in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and it gets cold there! It only gets down to 20 below here. (We assumed he was speaking in Fahrenheit, not Celsius.)
7/16 I realized last night that we have not turned on the air conditioner in the trailer since we left Maine. The weather is spectacular - mid-70's during the day and mid-50's nighttime low. I think we've had one rainy day in the 11 days we've been in the Maritimes.
We have no electricity at this campground, so it has been the first chance to test the performance of our solar panels. In this partially shaded site, the panels begin getting full sun at about 10 AM, and lose the sun at perhaps 2 PM. They continue to provide a few amps of charging even when shaded. They also provide several amps with a cloudy sky, unless the clouds are very heavy and dark. They seem to be supplying enough power to keep the batteries charged. So we're happy. It looks like we'll never run out of electricity unless we get many continuous days of heavy clouds.
Annapolis Royal is an historic and picturesque town. It served as the first capital of Nova Scotia, and changed hands between British and French many times, before the British recaptured it for the final time in 1710. We did the walking tour, looking at old houses, mostly from the outside. One house is open as a museum, but contains nothing. They have opened the floors and walls, showing the original construction (mud and reed between post and beam construction), and several layers of later modifications. The earliest part was built in approximately 1685 - perhaps the oldest surviving frame house in Canada. We also went through Fort Anne. The earthworks and two buildings from the 1710 fort still survive. The original crown charter for Nova Scotia is displayed here. We bought bread and breakfast rolls in the farmer's market in the middle of town, from a lady with a heavy accent who baked it all herself. We stopped at several stores looking for odds and ends for the trailer. The small, poorly stocked stores are a real pain - there is nothing comparable to Home Depot here. Alcohol prices are ridiculous. The cheapest local beer is $1.25 per can. Jug wine is around $7.00/liter - and that is Canadian wine that I generally classify as "grape Kool-Aid". I've heard that some excellent wines are being made in British Columbia, but I found none in the local government-operated outlets. Imported wines are roughly twice the Rochester price. (Those are Canadian dollars. The 35% exchange rate helps, but not much).
7/17 The trailer feels very snug as we look out at treetops disappearing into the fog. An occasional breeze shakes the trees and brings down a shower of "rain", actually just fog that has condensed on the tree leaves. So far there has been no actual rain.
7/18 We drove to Prince Edward Island this afternoon. Somewhere along the way, we hit something with the rear left corner of the trailer, hard enough to crack the fiberglass skin, bend the bumper, and pull a bit of the back wall away from the side, leaving a 2" gap. I probably turned too sharply to the right when pulling out of a gas pump lane, swinging the left rear corner out into a stanchion at the end of the row of pumps. The horrifying thing is that I was completely unaware of it until hours later - no bump, no noise. We are very isolated from what is going on back there. I now have a huge bandage of duct tape sealing up the corner to keep the rain out. Fixing it will be a fairly major task, and may not get done until we are settled into someplace near a big city for a week or more. Other than that, the trip was uneventful. The new bridge to PEI is impressive - all 9 miles of it. There is no suspension span at all - it is all supported on concrete pillars, spaced perhaps 200 feet apart. These supports have to withstand the force of major ice floes.
I continue to be surprised by the careful, thoughtful, driving of the average driver up here. We have had no problems at all with the trailer - everyone is polite and helpful when we need to change lanes or swing wide for a turn or whatever. No one passed us in a dangerous manner, even when we had to travel well under the speed limit on the bumpy, twisty, roads. There have been one or two exceptions to the above, but the overall situation is very nice.
We're now settled into Linkletter Provincial Park, on the southwest shore of PEI. We're about 100 feet from the ocean, or more properly, from Northumberland Channel, separating PEI from Nova Scotia. It has been a very hot day by local standards. Our truck thermometer read 84 degrees, and the local people were complaining. But we have a nice sea breeze, and it cools quickly after sundown. Just before dark a small thunderstorm came in from the water, giving us a little excitement. The trailer was rocking back and forth on its springs as the wind gusts hit. It lasted about 15 minutes, and then the sky was almost clear again.
Prince Edward Island (everyone here calls it PEI) is different! It is almost entirely flat, and in spite of the northern latitude, is good farming country. We've driven through thousands of acres of potatoes, and also seen corn, wheat, and a variety of vegetables. The island appears somewhat more prosperous than NS and NB. We've driven around most of the northern peninsula of the island, visiting a very interesting small museum describing the shellfish industry (oysters, clams, mussels, lobster, and snow crab are a major industry here), drove out to the Atlantic Wind Test Site - a Canadian government site for testing windmills, walked along the cliffs to a marshland where we found orchids, pitcher plants and lots of other swamp plants growing in a sphagnum"quaking bog" right at the top edge of high cliffs on the ocean. The juxtaposition of high-tech windmills with the traditional style lighthouse made interesting scenery. We saw a horse and cart starting to harvest 'Irish Moss' (a seaweed) in the shallows. It is processed to make carageenen, a food additive for ice cream, among other things. The horse drags a cartlike thing over the bottom in 1 to 5' deep water, and apparently scrapes the seaweed off the rocks. The seaweed is left in windrows in the sun to dry before processing.
We have yet to see a slum in Canada! Rural roads in the US lead past ramshackle shantys and run-down farms with ancient machinery rusting in the yards. There is none of that here. the rural homes are very small, but they are neat, generally freshly painted, and often have well-tended flower beds. Why such a huge difference?
7/22 We did one more garden in the morning, then hooked up and drove the 150 miles to Scotia Pine Campground near Truro (South Maitland) NS, over mostly familiar roads. This part of Nova Scotia is like Grand Central Station - to get from anywhere to anywhere else, you have to drive through here. We'll come through here again in the autumn - it's the only way back to the US. A packet of mail was waiting at the campground - Escapees and Fed Ex came through again. We had called Friday morning, and the mail was here on Monday waiting for our Tuesday arrival. Along the way, we picked up another quart of local strawberries. With a little luck, we'll get tired of strawberry shortcake before the season ends. We eagerly await the arrival of the local blueberries
7/23 At noon, we arrived at Adventure Tours Limited for an afternoon of rafting the tidal waves on Shubenacadie River. At about 1 pm, outfitted with boots and rain jackets, 12 customers headed down the river in two Zodiac rubber rafts, powered by 40 hp outboard motors. We arrived at the mouth of the river just before low tide and watched the tide begin to arrive - noticeable as a gentle swell, causing a small wave to rush along the mud banks on each side of the 3/4 mile wide river mouth. We followed this leading edge of tide upstream, and it soon became a bore (not at all boring) - a vertical edge of hissing, foaming water, initially about a foot high, but very uniform, stretching all the way across the river. As the river narrowed, the height of the bore increased, and it changed into a less organized, very turbulent, region of rushing water. As the river narrowed further and the incoming tide met the outrushing river water, a series of huge standing waves developed over a distance of perhaps 1/4 mile, and became stable long enough for us to make several runs through them. The largest waves were about 12 feet high and very steep sided, so that the raft seemed to be climbing vertically as it labored up the front of a wave, then became mostly airborne coming down the back side. Then, the waves would subside somewhat and we would motor upriver to where the next set of waves was forming, and make repetitive trips through these. We were on the water for about three hours, during which the river rose about 40 feet. Arriving back at the dock completely soaked and somewhat cold, we found hot dogs broiling, water heating, chips and salsa set out, and were soon eating a very welcome meal - provided as part of our "tour".
There are four rafting companies on this river. At one point, I counted a total of 10 rafts on the river. The owner of Adventure tours is new to the business but has lived on the river most of his life. His family owns 250 acres and a mile of river frontage, including an abandoned gypsum mine right at the river's edge, which provided a place to get down to the river through the cliffs.
Back at the campground in the evening, I carried the laptop to the office and downloaded Email - another cooperative campground which seemed to have no problem with my monopolizing their office phone for 10 minutes or so.
7/24 Did I say it was cool up here? This morning when I got up, it was 40 degrees outside and 54 in the trailer. Our down comforter kept us comfortable in bed, but as soon as I was up and about, I hunted up the little ceramic heater that I bought a year ago and have never used. The sky is an incredible deep blue - some of the clearest atmosphere I remember seeing - we've usually only seen this on mountaintops. We'll do a little more local sightseeing today, stay here another night, and head to North Sydney for the Newfoundland ferry tomorrow.