After something of a disturbed night last night, I was up and about fairly early on. And after a light breakfast, I started cleaning the motel room and tidying up the place, as well as chatting to a couple of people on the internet. And by chucking-out time, 10:00, I was ready to go.
I dumped the rubbish and took back the keys, and then headed off into town and the Sobeys supermarket for some shopping for lunch. And as most North American motels these days have microwaves, I also bought a bag of spuds and some more beans. It’s as well to be prepared.
I headed off northwards along the Arcadia Trail, and the first place that I visited was Cap Caissie. This is a small fishing port at the mouth of Shediac Bay.
It looked as if the tide was going out here so we’d be having a beach here in a couple of hours. And if you look at the weather that we were having this morning it would have been nice to have hung around for a while and done some sunbathing. But I had other things to do.
There’s a harbour here at Cap Caissie were no boats in there this morning, but there was a refrigerated lorry standing by.
Talking to the driver, it turns out that it’s lobster that is the catch here, and all 14 boats registered at the port are out at the catch. The driver was telling me that the catch hasn’t been so good this summer but over the last week or so things have been pretty good.
From the port at Cap Caissie there’s a good view of a lighthouse half a mile or so away. And so when you see a street name – Chemin du Lighthouse or Lighthouse Lane, you have to go for a look (or, at least, one of us does).
And if you think that Lighthouse Lane is going to lead you to the lighthouse you are mistaken because nothing could be farther from the truth, as you can see in this photo.
Further on round the trail is the mouth of the Cocagne river, and guarding the entrance at Cap Cocagne is another port.
This is another small commercial port and there is plenty of lobster fishing, judging by all of the lobster pots out there in the estuary, but there’s a considerable presence of pleasure boats here too.
As an aside, the word Cocagne in France has several meanings, two of which are completely contradictory.
You have the Pays de Cocagne, which is the Land of Milk and Honey where there are abundant harvests, a warm climate and all that kind of thing, and then we have the Mât de Cocagne which is the greasy pole that you try to climb up but you always keep on sliding down to the bottom
One of the games that we play while we are out on our travels in North America is “100 uses for a redundant school bus”.
School buses are only allowed by law to carry school kids for a certain number of years and then they have to be retired from school operation. There’s not much of a market for old school buses and so you find them littering the North American countryside not doing very much.
Here’s one from the 1950s or 1960s that’s been painted white and is being used as a summer house by the side of the sea. That’s certainly a novel way of making use of one.
After lunch by the river at Bouctouche I went for a drive around the Bay of Bouctouche. We’ve been here before a few years ago and so instead of the famous sand spit, I’ll show you something else.
This is actually a shop that’s been extended by the addition of a bow and a stern from some kind of wooden seafaring vessel and a couple of masts have been plated in it.
I was hoping to find out more information about it so I went to make enquiries, but despite all of the doors being open and the stock being lined up outside for inspection, there wasn’t a soul about. That made me think that maybe this was what became of the Mary Celeste.
That wasn’t all that there was to see around here either. Just across the road were a coupe of old motor vehicles. We’ve not had too many of them to date.
The coach is an old Prevost that looks as if it might have been built in the late 1940s or something like that, and the car is a Dodge that dates from 1928. It’s been painted in the colours of Arcadia, which was the name of the area around the New Brunswick – Nova Scotia border during the time of the French occupation.
Further on along the coast you can catch a glimpse of Prince Edward island away across the Northumberland Strait.
With a telephoto lens you can come up with some kind of shot of the coastline over there, and the Prince Edward Island wind farm. And note the wind turbines too because one thing that you will notice about New Brunswick is that there aren’t any, despite the magnificent weather.
New Brunswick is still tangled up in the mess of the Lepreau Nuclear Power Station and trying desperately to go to any lengths to justify the massive expenditure that has been poured into yet another one of the Province’s white elephants.
We saw this bridge near Rexton back in 2013 and so I won’t post it again, but I do remember making a remark about the state of the carpentry.
And so I can show you a photo of one part of the bridge as it is today, and you cans ee how much it has deteriorated. and I thought that it was bad three years ago. I wouldn’t like to be driving on this bridge in another three years time
I stopped off on the edge of Rexton to fuel up – Strider still has his unhealthy fuel consumption – and this ship in the Richibucto River caught my attention. I went across to photograph it.
It’s not a real ship of course. it was constructed in 2003 as a symbol of Rexton’s ship-building industry. They reckon that in a period from 1819 to the turn of the 20th Century some 105 ships were built here, of which 94 were built in just one shipyard – that owned by the Jardine family.
My road north took me to the town of St Louis de Kent, a town that has a claim to fame in that the world’s largest Acadian flag is flown in the town.
St Louis de Kent is quite a hotbed of Acadian nationalism, a movement that took hold at the end of the 19th Century, mainly due to the efforts of Marcel-François Richard, to resurrect the heritage of the Acadian settlers – the French settlers of the mid-18th Century who were abandoned by the French empire during the Seven Years War.
Whilst no-one will deny the events that occurred subsequent to the fall of Acadia, no-one should lose sight of the fact that we are discussing a period of history 250 years ago and it’s a mistake to judge historical events by today’s standards.
Many colonists of French origin were indeed expelled from Acadia, but only those (at first, anyway) who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the King of England. But there was nothing unusual in asking citizens of captured colonists to take such an oath and even more so when a war between the two colonial powers was still taking place.
Displacement of recalcitrant colonists was nothing but normal behaviour back in those days and if you remember being with me in the Czech Republic last May, we discussed the displacement of recalcitrant Germans of many generations of settlement from the Sudetenland as late as 1948 – 200 years after the displacement of the Acadians – and no-one thought that what took place in Eastern Europe after World War II and which affected 30 million people was a major issue.
That’s not to take issue, of course, with the cultural traditions of the descendants of the Acadian settlers – I’m all in favour of celebrating culture and tradition – but St Louis de Kent is another place where all of the information on the tourist information boards is written in nothing but French – and that’s in an officially bilingual province too.
There’s a statue here to Marguerite Bourgeoys and we all know who she is. We visited the house of her birth in Troyes in 2014 and we’ve mentioned her many times on our journeys round Montreal.
She organised the women and girls of Montreal with their religious and educational needs during the crises of the early days of the colony there, and it was the organisation that she founded, the Convent of the Sisters of the Congregation of Our Lady, that was asked to open a convent here in the late 19th Century.
You’ve all seen this place before. It’s the Fundy Line Motel in Miramichi where I stayed in winter 2003 and this is where I ended up last night.
It’s quite basic and a little tired but then so are its prices, and it’s scrupulously clean. It scores very highly on my value-for-money index and I’m happy to stay here for the night.
It has a microwave, which is good news, for I have a bag of potatoes and a can of beans, as well as a vegan burgerleft over from when I was in Shediac.
That’s me organised for tonight anyway.
