Posts From New Brunswich

Anne of Green Gables, a well know book by Louise M Montgomery, was set in a fictional house and property called Green Gables. That setting was inspired by a house in the town of Cavendish PEI owned by the authors grandparent's cousins. That site has been a major tourist destination for nearly 100 years and is now administered by the Canadian National Parks service. This morning we joined the throngs and paid homage to girl-hood fantasy. We spent a pleasant hour touring the house (decorated as described in the book) and wandering the grounds including the famous haunted woods. Like everything we have seen on PEI the setting was sunny, warm and tranquil.

The Bay of Fundy (the body of water that separates New Brunswick from Nova Scotia) boasts the largest rise and fall between low and high tide of any place on earth with a record of 16.2 meters recorded at Noel, NS. These extreme tides are explained by the shape of the bay itself which causes the incoming Atlantic tide to backup within the bay. Today we got a chance to experience the tide swing of Fundy with a visit to Hopewell Rocks a Provincial Park on the western (New Brunswick) side of the bay. Hopewell is famous for its Flowerpots. Segments of forested coastal cliffs that have been separated from the mainland and stand just yards off shore like pillars of stone and rock topped with a small garden. The experience at Hopewell is that at low tide one can stroll among the flowerpots with the gardens way overhead, whereas once the tide comes in these same pillars become small forested islands. An additional attraction for the children among us (both young and old) is to walk out into the bay into the soft, fine-grained but very sticky mud that at low tide seems to go for miles.