Saturday August 17th.

We drove to Fundy National Park, in Alma and began the tour with a visit to Alma’s famous bakery where we sampled Cinnamon Sticky Buns, yum, yum.  Next stop was the park where we parked, unloaded our bikes and cycled to the  start of the Point Wolfe Shiphaven trail.  The park is very big and hilly most people drive to the trailheads.  The Bay of Fundy is famous for having the biggest tides in the world – up to 16 metres at their peak on the Nova Scotia shore.  We were on the New Brunswick shore, but they were still impressive – 13 metres (42 feet).  The hike was beautiful with views into the river valley.  The tide was approaching low water, so we got to see the impact of the tides.  Our next port of call in the park was Dickson Falls where we took another hike.  Again, very pretty with crystal clear water running down the falls.    

We biked back to the car and had a fish lunch in Alma– the cod and haddock were very fresh and delicious!  The boats in the harbor were now totally dried out.    

The tour continued to Cape Enrage which was covered in fog.  (Did we mention that the Bay of Fundy is also famous for fog?)  We did find the lighthouse however, and walked down to the beach which was steep down to the water’s edge, giving an impression of just how low the tide was.  There was a stairway to get down to the beach with warnings posted indicating when high and low tide were and at what time you must return to the stairs to be safe.  

Next up was Hopewell Rocks in Cape Hopewell, where we took several short hikes down to the beaches.  The main attraction was the rocks that have been carved out from underneath by wave action at various states of tide.  There were also some very impressive flats, extending 2.5 miles at low water.    

The whole day was very enjoyable and we’d love to go back some day, (not by boat!), to explore further.  We would thoroughly recommend New Brunswick as a vacation destination.  In fact, New Brunswick is interesting for another reason – its Canada’s only official bi-lingual province and on peut commencer un phrase en francais, and continue in English if you run out of French words.  In fact many of the locals do just that – switch languages mid sentence.  Or ask a question in French and get the reply back in English, whatever language pops into the person’s head it seems.