Saint John New Brunswick
Just had our first day of our Canadian Maritimes vacation. We’re now in Saint John, New Brunswick, which never seems to be shortened to St. John. We arrived here last night—Scott, our traveling companion Friederike, Daisy Dog and I. Our trip over was quite nice—the weather was cooperated and the scenery was beautiful. The company was great too — lots to talk about. We traveled through Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine (with a stop in Bangor for some food truck fare), then crossed the border without incident. (Well, the first crossing was closed, but we found another closeby.)
We arrived in the oldest little city in Canada a bit hungry, so we took a walk about for a restaurant open on Sunday that would take a little dog. The answer was Beer Bread—a Pizza workshop (?). Beer bread itself is bread made with beer, served with honey mustard. This was good. The pizza was excellent — thin crust with mushrooms. We watched TV without sound and the Tonys. We also had enormous beers, which the waitress talked us into. Moosehead, cause, well, first day in Canada.
This morning, we got up and headed to the Saint John City Market for breakfast. This place has been around since the 1800s and is still thriving today. It was still getting going a bit, but Scott and I got some nice breakfast sandwiches with interesting things like carrots, cabbage and apple spread on them. Friederike went for carrot cake. The little stand had “carrot” in its name.
After breakfast, we picked up Daisy, who we’d left in the room and headed to the more natural sight-seeing attractions. We stopped at the famous reversing falls rapids, where the tide in the Bay of Fundy was supposed to make reverse falls. For some reason, this was underwhelming today. But it’s a cool thing to see. We then headed to Irving Nature Preserve, which is hundreds of acres along the Bay of Fundy preserved by — I think — the Irving oil guy.
We hiked around the coastline and saw some beautiful views and had a nice walk through the forest. Daisy confirmed her talents as a trail doggie. We figured the walk at 11,000 steps and, calculating for her size, well, that’s a lot more steps. She was still going strong at lunch, when Scott fed her some leftover bits from his lobster club.
After lunch, we started a walking tour of Saint John. The first house on the tour was the oldest in the city, which has been partially destroyed by fire more than once. This house is know as the “Loyalist House,” as Saint John was a refuge for those loyal to Britain during the American Revolution. The house survived the fires, which is not surprising, given the strong stone and cement (?) foundation. We went on to a stone church with a surprising Mogen David on the front and many commerical buildings dating back to the 1800s. Also on our tour were our accommodations, The Chipman Suites, well-built old carriage houses and other buildings, which were well-built enough to stop the fires from spreading to other parts of town. We will try to finish the tour later.
Another notable stop was at the Freak Lunchbox candy store. It was very cool and no, we weren’t able to resist.
