… on my little spec at the Mactaquac Country Park not too far north-west of Fredericton. For the next few days I’m not sleeping rough but taking advantages of the faciities that £25 per night have brought me. You can see that I’ve already done one load of hand-washing.

And it could have been even cheaper too. “Would you like the senior discount?” asked the Park Ranger.
“What’s the age limit?” asked our hero
“65”
That’s my ego well and truly punctured, isn’t it?

But it’s quiet here. Not too many people around and the camp site is in the middle of a forest by a lake.

And that’s the view after you have driven about half a mile to rejoin the main road. Rolling down that hill in neutral can result in some impressive speeds and you need yo be careful that you don’t have an encounter with a deer because there are dozens of them about, which is good news for me and good news for Strawberry Moose, but for different reasons.

That’s the giant and controversial Mactaquac Dam, that was built in the 1960s to provide power for this part of the Saint John valley.

And controversial was probably not the word as it cut off a great many First Nation Canadians from their traditional waterborne navigation routes, damaged the salmon fisheries (according to some) and flooded the whole of the Saint John valley northwards.

The New Brunswick Department of Natural Resources was no help with my plans to build something ecological on my land here. But then again, I didn’t really expect it. It loks as if I’m really on my own so if people don’t like it, they can’t say that I haven’t tried.

Ooohhhhh!

We saw an REO Speedwagon in Newfoundland last year but that was quite ancient. This is a much more modern one, a Gold Comet and is probably from the late 1940s, I reckon, although what do I know?

Still, here it is parked up on someone’s lawn just outside Fredericton.

I came across a Value Village in Fredericton. There aren’t charity shops as there are in the UK, but all the charities seem to have banded together to have one communal shop which is much better from my point of view.

A pile of books, a pile of CDs and, at long last, for just $3:99, a whistling kettle. I’ll probably find that it has a leak in it.

And at Kent Hardware, I overheard a sales assistant talking to a colleague, so I went over to him. “Where do you come from?” I asked
“Manchester” he replied
“Thought so” I said. “I recognised the accent”.
So we had a chat and I mentioned that I came from Crewe.
“So what’s in Crewe?” he asked
“Absolutely nothing at all since I left” I replied.