As our possible ferry ride was pushed back a day and a half, we have found ourselves with a bunch of extra time, so there was no need to push all the way to Sydney, Nova Scotia today. Instead we took a leisurely drive to Moncton and spent the day at Hopewell Rocks on the Bay of Fundy.
I was expecting a much bigger road down to Hopewell Rocks, as it is a decently well-visited tourist destination, but it is a very small and windy road with houses and farms on both sides of it. Once at the rocks, we spent some time viewing everything as it appeared at high tide (which was 12:10pm today) before grabbing our food from the van and eating lunch at a picnic table. The park area is quite big, and while it has a restaurant, it also has a lot of picnic tables. To ensure you can see high and low tide, once you've paid to enter, you can enter and exist for two days, so we took the time after lunch to leave and explore some of the small places outside the park along the road. As we were leaving, I noticed that lots of people showed up for high tide and then found a place to sit and wait for low tide without ever leaving.
Our first stop after exiting was a odd craft store called the Pink Church that we saw on the way in, but unfortunately, it was closed during the week and only open on weekends, so we headed a bit further back to a railroad museum. I love trains enough that I even love obscure little railway museums in small towns and this one was all of that. They had a barn full of bits and pieces, an engine shed with a few engines and a couple of passenger cars and for some reason a CF-101 on the grass beside the parking lot.
After exploring the trains, we went to a small market in the same town - four or five tiny sheds, each of which operated as a different shop. There was an ice cream/slushy shop, a small local farm market, a bookstore (which was unfortunately closed) and a sewing/quilting shop, where we met the very friendly proprietor and Sandra purchased some nautical fabric to use in a future project. We finally stopped at another museum, but just to see the guns out front - two German WWI artillery guns that had been captured at Vimy Ridge and were now on display here in New Brunswick.
Then it was back to Hopewell Rocks for low tide (with occurred around 6:30pm). The stairs down to the shore are open at around the midway point (so 3:00pm) as the tide drops extremely quickly. We walked out onto the rocks, took some pictures and got muddy. Then it was a fairly long walk along the shore, all of which had been deep underwater a few hours ago. The speed of the tide was really amazing when we took the time to stop and watch in one place. Sandra and Bradley walked a little further while the rest of us looked at the water. We quickly found some snails and in the five minutes we spent looking down, the water had moved back by a huge amount. I can only imagine how scary it is to be down there while the tide is coming in.
Tomorrow we are off to Sydney with no real plans on what to do along the way.
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