Bar Harbour to St. John, NB

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At 7am the road to Bar Harbour is an easy drive. The morning was beautiful and I arrived on the island where Bar Harbour is located just as the residents were getting going for the day. It was great to see it without the crowds.

Even though there were few people about, there was a guy out walking who came over to talk to me. He was a motorcyclist as well, but was traveling by car on this trip. We compared notes for a bit and he helped by taking a picture of me with Bar Harbour in the background.

Bar Harbour itself is very nice, but the rest of the island is pretty spectacular as well. Bar Harbour is clearly focussed on tourism. I think their only sustainable business is the mooring and servicing of lots of expensive looking boats. The days when there was any resource business, like fishing, here are long past.

Driving around the perimter roads of the island, I saw a lot of expensive homes; however, there were also lots of public beaches where we common folk could get to the ocean. The main island is protected by lots of smaller outlying islands, so the surf is pretty tame on the beaches.

With the clear sky and bright sun, there were multiple tones of blue in the water and sky offset by even more tones of green in the forest that came to the water's edge.

Some motorcyclists told me to be sure to go up Cadillac Mountain for the view of all the islands. It sounded interesting at first, but I couldn't imagine it being better than West Coast vistas. When I asked a couple of locals about the side trip, they said it was alright, but people mostly go there to see the sunrise or sunset. I would see neither, so I gave it a pass.

Everywhere I went on the island, it seemed peaceful. With people not rushing aobut in the towns and no cars racing down the roads, it suggested an era from an earlier decade when there seemed to be more available time in a day.

As I made my way back to Ellsworth and the main coastal highway, I met the onslaught of daily traffic coming out to the island. Thank goodness I avoided that mess.

Parked at the Bar Harbour airport was a polished B-17 Boeing bomber of WW2 vintage. It belonged to a group from the Confederate Airforce in the US and they were selling tickets to go up for a ride over Bar Harbour and around the island. I debated going. It was a bit pricy, but the main deterrent was it wasn't flying until the afternoon. The ride didn't have enough appeal for me to wait around. Mind you, if they offerred the opportunity to ride in the cockpit I probably would have. Dream on Jack.

Back on Highway 1, the non-coast, coastal road, I settled into putting some miles under the wheels. I went through one pretty little town after the other, with the white cupula topping the townhall and one or more white church spires poking through the blanket of trees.

There are many towns that look like this, and, from a macro viewpoint, they all look like they should have good used bookstores, at least one classy coffee place, a good library, and other olde town things - but they don't. In fact, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan puts most of them to shame with repect ot those things. These places are basically small towns with small town businesses and small town mentality that just happen to have a visual impact that suggests something more. I have found that, if a town has a good, well used library, many of those other things I mentioned are there as well.

The driving habits along this highway have pushed my rant button. I dislike the lack of respect drivers, especially large truck drivers, have for small town speed limits. Go ahead and speed on the open road if you like, but not in towns, and not as excessive as I'm witnessing.

I'm sure their thinking is, I'm OK if I'm not caught. Surely it should be, I had better take it easy here, there are people crossing the street, children around, and local vehicles are generally moving slowly as people go about their daily business. No such luck. If the posted speed limit in the town is 35mph, which seems reasonable to me, truckers will usually rumble through at 50mph. When these jerks drift up behind me, I pull over and let them pass. We both feel much better.

I arrived at the border at Calais about 2pm, had a sandwich and filled up with gas. A fill of my bike in the US is about $18CDN, whereas in Eastern Canada, at $1.17 a litre, a fill costs about $26. Rediculous.

At over 90F, the temperature is about as hot as I can stand in my motorcycle clothing. When I parked my bike for lunch it almost tipped over as the kickstand sunk into the asphalt that was almost liquid from the heat.

Once across the border I visited St. Andrews for a look around. It is a nice place, but main street is yet another tourist haven. You know, the line up of gift shops and cafes ranging form cheap to expensive and all overpriced in their own right. Not a place I would spend my time if I was here. Yet the coast is very pretty and accessible, and there are some very nice hotels and B&Bs.

After settling in at St. John, NB and checking out the schedule of the ferry to Nova Scotia, I went into the city centre. The immediate downtown area has some unique buildings, but basically it struck me as an old port city with lots of lower cost housing. The houses could have been built anywhere from the early 1900s up to last year. I saw nothing that pulled me to explore its history, so I decided to leave the next morning and do my exploration of New Brunswick culture when I got to Fredricton.

The downtown was filled with young people attending some sort of festival of rock music, or whatever they call the current pop genre of today. Most seemed to be talking about dringking or what happened when they were drinking the night before. Interesting - it all sounds like the same meaningless stuff I used to talk about in my early 20s when I was out on the town. Hmmm, life goes on, doesn't it.

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Photos

Seal Harbour Beach
This became very crowded later. A beautful beach.

A small lake near Bar Harbour
It really does look like this.