Travel Dates: September 11-12, 2023
it was time to take our road trip to Canada. We cleaned the windshield and our glasses and donned our “look for moose” hats; As we neared the border near Calais and St Stephen New Brunswick on US Highway 1 toward Calais and St Stephen we spied a detour to the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge. Count us in. Upon entering we found ourselves on a well-maintained gravel road that winds through moose habitat. We were all atwitter. We pulled over at a spot between two ponds.
We were bummed we saw no moose – or much other wildlife – on our 1 hour detour. “No worries” I said. I had been reading about the new Generative AI feature in Photoshop and figured I could easily create a picture that shows a moose. While I was at it; I added another water-loving mammal – a hippopotamus. I can dream, can’t I?
I literally did this in 10 minutes after watching one tutorial. There are ways to make it much more realistic, but I just wanted to play. I posted another version of this image on Facebook when we returned along with a strongly worded hint that neither the moose nor the hippo were real. But plenty of folks looked at the photo without reading the words and some folks thought it was the real deal. Sad to say, no, it isn’t.
We crossed the border into New Brunswick without incident and stopped for lunch in St Stephen. When I look on Google Maps, the GPS embedded in the image is a residence; but looking at the street view pictures I think it was Carman’s Diner.
You know what they about sex: when it’s good, it’s really good and when it’s bad, well, it’s still pretty good. The same does not go for Poutine, In Montreal 2022 we all tried some poutine: fries with brown gravy and cheese curds. We were not impressed – at all. While Carla, Terri, and Jim saw no reason to try their luck again, I wanted one more sample.
Too bad for the rest of the crew; this was seriously good. Chatting with our wait person I asked the secret. The fries and gravy need to be hot and the cheese curds need to be small so they will melt. And of course the gravy has to be good. Let’s compare this poutine with last year’s mini-disaster: enormous curds; the fries are too large, and the gravy was nothing to write home about (well, technically I am writing about it – but you know what I mean, right?).
In my previous post I wrote about the numerous tidal inlets of the coast of Maine. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia read that and said “Hold my beer.” Their tidal inlets are dominated by the Bay of Fundy; home of the biggest tide changes in the world. Quoting from this web page from the Canadian park service…
At Fundy National Park, the difference between high and low tide can be as much as 12 metres. At the head of the bay, the tide can rise 16 metres, the height of a four-story building.
https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/nb/fundy/nature/environment/marees-tides#
For some reason the Bay of Fundy grabbed my imagination when I was in fourth or fifth grade – I must have read a book about it. Why are the tide changes so drastic? Based on 15 minutes of research (of the web site listed above) t is due to both the shape of the bay, and the resonance – or “seiche” of the water movement. Quoting again from the website:
Fundy’s tides are the highest in the world because of an unusual combination of resonance (or seiche) and the shape of the bay. Like water in any basin, the water in the Bay of Fundy has a natural rocking motion called a seiche. You could compare this to the movement of water in a bathtub. Although the water in a bathtub sloshes from one end to the other and back again in a few seconds, it takes about 13 hours for the water in the bay to rock from the mouth of the bay to the head of the bay and back again.
The Atlantic Ocean tide rising and flooding into the bay every 12 hours and 25 minutes reinforces the rocking motion. To imagine this, picture an adult giving a gentle push to a child on a swing. Just a very small push, at the right time, is enough to make it go higher and higher. A pulse from the ocean tides sustains the seiche in the bay.
The Bay of Fundy’s length is important. That’s what makes the seiche frequency match the pulse from the Atlantic Ocean tides. The bay’s shape is of secondary importance although still significant. The bay becomes narrower and shallower towards its head, forcing the water higher up the shores.
https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/nb/fundy/nature/environment/marees-tides#
Now you know.
We would spend time checking out the Bay of Fundy from both the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia sides. Our first stop was Reversing Falls in the city of Saint John where a series of smaller bays dump into the Bay of Fundy. The paper mill makes a nice interesting backdrop.
During low tide Grand Bay goes down a waterfall into the Bay of Fundy. As the tide rises it pushes the waterfalls backwards. Our timing wasn’t perfect; we arrived a few hours before high tide. Nevertheless, in the video I captured you can see the tide pushing its way up the Bay while the waterfall still has the upper hand in the background. WordPress doesn’t handle videos as well as photos, so I loaded the video up to YouTube.
After pulling into our hotel in Saint John, Carla, Terri, and I walked up to a couple of nearby parks while Jim went further afield. Being the social guy he is Jim started up a conversation with someone who knows the area and told him we had to take in Hopewell Rocks on our way to Halifax. I’m glad we did. The route took us along a nice stretch of the Bay of Fundy
We stopped at the Waterside Beach Biosphere Reserve along the way. The tide was definitely out.
Driving on we saw a sign for a lighthouse on the tip of Fundy’s Cape Enrage. Luckily for us the sea was calm rather than enraged. We could see the lighthouse as we approached.
That’s Nova Scotia across the bay
It wasn’t very crowded at all so we got to take in the lighthouse at our leisure.
That is a fog horn in the foreground. On the back it has a warning that it may sound without warning and can cause hearing damage. I’m glad it wasn’t foggy. After getting our fill we headed down the road to Hopewell Rocks. What a sight! We were fortunate to hit it at a lowish tide; you can clearly see the dramatic sea level changes on the bay.
Those poor lonely trees. The person on the lower right gives a nice sense of scale
There was a little section where people stacked rocks – until the next tide change. This is a nice balancing act.
It was getting into mid afternoon and we still had a few hours before we’d get to our stop for the night; so we headed on up the coast. It was a great couple of days of seeing the dramatic effects of the Bay of Fundy.
Next stop: Halifax, Nova Scotia
