The day I crossed into Canada, it was raining when I woke and didn't stop, really, for about three days. Soggy? Yes. Happy, still? Yesser! This was the view for most of my drive through Maine into New Brunswick.
Just before crossing the border, I stopped at the St. Croix Island National Historical Site. The larger island on the left in this picture is St. Croix (with Canada visible in the background there), where Champlain and his cronies established the first French settlement in the new world (pre-dating Jamestown by just a few years). It failed (if you can call half the men dying from scurvy when the island got iced in for the winter a failure) but Champlain et. al. then finally heeded the advice of the friendly Passamaquody Indians who'd been telling them all along that the island wasn't a great idea, moved across the bay to Nova Scotia, and tried again--with a better outcome. Champlain eventually went on to such glories as founding Quebec City, so it sounds like it all worked out in the end.
From there, it was on to the border crossing at Calais-St. Stephens, where every question the Canadian immigration official asked me opened a new can of worms. "How long do you plan to be in Canada?" "When do they expect you back at work?" "How are you paying for these months of travel?" "Where do you live, then?" "Are you carrying any personal protection, such as firearms or mace?" My attempt to be truthful and explain having quit my job to travel indefinitely and now living in my car because I no longer had an apartment in Colorado to match my license plates but that my family in WI would give me a place to stay when I returned seemed only to provoke more confusion. It didn't seem wise at that point to joke that I had a very large, sturdy walking stick with which to defend myself from attack by Canadians. Eventually he gave up and let me in.
Traveling tip: If you cross the border here, take an immediate right, go down the street a few blocks, and check out the Ganong Chocolate Museum, where your entry ticket includes all you can eat of their specialty chocolates.
From there, I drove down a little peninsula to the town of St. Andrew-by-the-Sea, which I wanted to visit because everyone I asked about it sighed and said it was lovely. The rain made it less than appealing to explore, but I give two thumbs up to Honeybeans coffeeshop, where some of the chairs had red fleece lap blankets draped over them for customer use. What more cozy way could you treat a rainy day?
From there, up to the college town of Fredericton, aka "Freddie." Couchsurfing with some local grad students absolutely made my experience there. In less than 24 hours, with them absorbing me completely into their lives, I got to (1) play trivia at a local student bar, (2) watch for the first time what might be the worst movie EVER MADE (Vampire's Kiss), (3) have breakfast at a hole-in-the wall Belgian waffle place, (4) visit the Fredericton Farmer's Market (THE place to be on a Saturday morning), and (5) try bouldering at the basement rock wall of the campus sports center (no pictures of that, for better or worse. Couchsurfing at its best, for sure!
Too soon, it was time to bid farewell to Freddie and head south (via the scenic-as-promised Hwy 102 from Gagetown to Evandale)...
...to Saint John, where a puddle-jumping plane was bearing my mom and her friend D to join me for a long-awaited Maritimes adventure. Stay tuned!
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