We arrived in Saint John at 1:00 in the afternoon, which is very unusual on a cruise. At least the day started with a nice sunrise.
We had a tour planned with a local company, Hugo’s Tours, and because we had some stragglers that couldn’t find the bus, we got a very late start, which unfortunately threw the entire day off. Our new friends, Kenton and MP, had also booked this tour. Small world!
The bus turned out to be a “party” bus, complete with disco lighting and a stripper pole! Needless to say, this was not on my “cruise bingo card”! I’m not sure what Hugo’s Tours was expecting, but pole dancing wasn’t on the agenda.
Our first stop was the Saint John City Market. This market has been here since the 1870’s, and is a big draw from the cruise ship market. We couldn’t understand why, as it was mostly overpriced tourist crap, but I was able to pick up some beer for the bus tour, so it did have a silver lining.
Even though we were WAY behind schedule, we stopped here for 45 minutes. This place deserves 15 tops. Our tour guide said the roof was built to look like the bottom of a ship. WTF? Nope. I don’t think our guide has ever seen the bottom of a boat.
We then stopped at an overlook of the harbor at Fort Howe, with a view of the city and our cruise ship.
The site below is known for the “Reversing Falls”, a waterfall that goes one direction on the ebb (outgoing) tide, and the other direction on the flood tide. Unfortunately we were here at high tide, so there was really no falls of any type. Maybe if the tour guide had tracked the timing we might have come here first? This tour guide is starting to piss me off!
Here is a photo from the internet. It looks like the whole Reversing Falls thing is actually kind of lame, except in extreme tidal situations.
At least you get a good look at this beautiful pulp and paper mill!
We then took a very long drive in bad traffic to get to St Martins Sea Caves on the Bay of Fundy, home to the highest tidal changes in the world! The cliffs among the sea caves are beautiful!
Fortunately the tide was going out, so we could walk down and around the sea caves. They were blocked from entering though, so we didn’t go inside. You can see how high the tide rises here by the green on the wall, which floods the caves.
This crane was walking around at the tide line, getting some nice morsels to eat.
There were plenty of morsels among the rocks, with thousands of little hermit crabs everywhere!
Fishing boats in the adjacent harbor actually have boat stands they sit on at low tide.
This nearby covered bridge crossing Vaughan Creek is brand new, built in 2022, replacing the old one from 1935. It’s the only two lane covered bridge in Canada. In the background you can see a lighthouse, as well as another covered bridge. The lighthouse was built as the St Martins visitor center, which was of course closed.
The other covered bridge in the photo above, the Hardscrabble, is slightly older, built in 1946.
This is what I expect a covered bridge to look like…not some two lane behemoth!
It started raining hard on the way back to Saint John, and we ran into traffic again, so by the time we got back it was dark. We were supposed to go back to the Reversing Falls to see how it looked at the end of the tour, but we were so late that people had dinners to get to, and I’m not sure if we could even see anything in the dark.
Since the ship was in Port until 10 PM, we decided to hit an Irish Pub in town versus eating on the ship. When we returned to the dock at 9 PM, I was surprised when security told us the ship was waiting for us because they wanted to depart early. WTF? My second WTF of the day no less! If you tell passengers to be onboard by 9:30 PM for a 10:00 PM departure, don’t expect them to know you want to leave early! Idiots.
Up next, we are back in the United States, visiting Eastport, Maine.
