Bay of Fundy, NS/NB, Canada 2019 – NNs On the Wind

September 29, 2019December 5, 2019 Kathleen Ennen

SEP 25, 2019 – to the Shubenacadie River, NS

As we head back towards the Bay of Fundy and our trip around to New Brunswick and back into the US at Calais, we stop at the Annapolis Royal Generating Station which is the only tidal generating station in North America. The plant can generate roughly 80-100 megawatt hours of electricity daily, depending on the tides from the Bay of Fundy. We had a brief visit to take a tour. The tide comes in and once it’s in the embayment it is held back by gates which are released at low tide allowing for the outflow to turn the turbines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Royal_Generating_Station

Having discovered a lovely wine, a riesling, from the Annapolis Valley, we learned we’d be driving by it on the way to the campground. We made a brief stop for some tastes! We already had a bottle of the riesling, so we bought 2 bottles of dynamic reds. The pricing with the exchange rate is terrific!!! and with our purchase the tasting was free.

We got to the campground with plenty of time to set up.

SEP 26, 2019 – Shubenacadie River, NS

The “Shubie” has the highest recorded tides in the world and is known for massive tidal bores. The campground has a viewing station that is a 15 minute walk for where we parked. This time of year, and especially after the hurricane, most campgrounds are very quiet. We hoped to walk to see the tidal boor on the Shubenacadie from the campground’s look out point. We tried but the time posted on the website was wrong! We stayed until it was nearly dark and walked back to find better intel for our next attempt.

The next morning we tried again. I’m not sure when the bores are as big as reported. We did see it come in over the wide expanse of sandbar at low tide, but once again it wasn’t much more than a few inches in height. Maybe six inches?

SEP 27, 2019 – Shubenacadie River, NS and Fundy NP/Alma, NB

Our last stop in Canada will be for a 3 night stay in Fundy National Park in New Brunswick. Our campsite overlooks a portion of the Bay of Fundy and we are a twenty minute walk into the small town of Alma. The park includes a beautiful 9-hole golf course and Thom promptly heads out to play while I take the opportunity to walk into town. The one main street along the water has a number of restaurants and two seafood shops. The lobster harvest season doesn’t open for a couple of weeks but there are fresh scallops that look wonderful. I get half a pound for a little treat with dinner!! Sautéed in butter, period.

The small harbor area has the fishing fleet and we learn that due to the great tidal fluctuation you only have an hour or so on either side of high tide to get in or out of the channel. At low tide the boats are sitting on the mud bottom. A typical day starts an hour before high tide, whenever it is, and goes to the start of the next high tide roughly 12 hours later.

We enjoy 2 days of beautiful sunny weather before we make our way back to the US.

SEP 29, 2019 – Fundy NP Golf

Pretty Fall day today so we enjoyed the golf course next to our campsite in Cannontown CG. We are leaving Canada tomorrow and finally making our way back to New England USA.

The drive to St Stephens on the CA side and Calais on the US side is about 2.5 hrs. From there we’ll drive to Eastport with a stop for provisions before setting up at a campground about a mile from town.

We’ll spend 2 nights in Eastport ME and 2 nights on Mt Desert Island, near Bar Harbor ME. Then two nights in York ME before we complete this nearly one your tour around the us and arrive back in Dorchester, MA where we left from last November 2.

We have traveled over the years and retired in 2017, when we started on a nine month long adventure departing in December 2017. In the past we’ve traveled to Sri Lanka, Africa (several times), Turkey, and made a number of trips to Europe, and St Lucia. Our 2015 trip to Turkey, took nearly 3 weeks to explore Istanbul, Cappadocia and the areas in proximity to Izmir.

This is a chronicle of our travels, past and present. We love to travel by trains, planes, ships, and cars – and love sailing whenever and wherever we can.

We retired from the US General Services Administration, the Federal Government’s landlord! Thom worked at planning and large scale program management of numerous projects and Kathleen, a registered professional civil engineer, was a project manager for many infrastructure and building renovation projects, including both design and construction aspects, in New England, Florida and the metro DC area. We lived in Washington DC for 12 years and upon retirement sold the house, putting a few things in a 5’x5’ storage unit and started traveling.

On return to the US in September 2018, after traveling to 21 countries, we bought a Class C RV – 2019 Thor Freedom Elite 24FE. We enjoyed our week long camping trip in New Zealand in a small converted van with few amenities, so this seemed liked a good way to tour the US. We hope to visit family along the way and as many US National Parks as possible.

UPDATE – the Covid pandemic made travel more difficult for us. We were abroad for several months when the pandemic started and returned to the US in July 2020. After several months in the RV to visit Utah and Albuquerque NM, we moved east, bought a house on the Northern Neck of Virginia, and sold the RV. For 2021 and 2022 we tended to our new house and cottage, gardens and various boats including a 18’ 1977 Marshall Sanderling catboat and a 25’ Steiger Craft Chesapeake fishing boat, and kayaks and a canoe. Hopefully travel will start again one day!!

May 2022