Hide Article Text (OCR)
E10 — The Berkshire Eagle, Sunday, April 6, 2003TravelOn the Web: www.BerkshireEagle.comNew Brunswick: Time slows down and tides speed upCourtesy Fairmont Hotels and ResortsSt. Andrews, with the Algonquin Hotel in the background, was founded by British loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. It’s part of a visit to the sleepy Canadian province of New Brunswick, just above Maine.When you go to New BrunswickThe Washington PostGETTING THERE: New Brunswick, Canada, is on Maine's northern border. Proof of U.S. citizenship (passport or birth certificate) is required for travel to Canada.■GETTING AROUND: Tourism is largely concentrated along New Brunswick's eastern coast and the Bay of Fundy. Heading north from the Maine line. Highway 1 connects coastal villages, ferry connections to the Fundy islands, Saint John (the largest city), Fundy National Park and the maritime wonders of the upper bay near the Nova Scotia border. We started on Grand Manan Island, reachable by ferry from Blacks Harbour. There are up to four sailings a day in the spring, seven in the summer. Adult round-trip tickets are about $6.50, children $3, under 5 free; cars are $19. Details: 506-636-3922, www.coastaltran sport.ca.■WHERE TO STAY: On Grand Manan, the most talked-about place is the Inn at Whale Cove (506-662-3181, www.holidayjunction .com/whalecove), a well-reviewed inn and restaurant on the north end. Rooms start at $64 a night, cottages from $473 a week.The island is also full of small, family-run guest houses and cottages. Beach Front Cottages (506-662- 3115, www.beachfront cot-tages.ca; rates from $425 a week), where we stayed, are perched on a bluff, overlooking the sea and the handsome village of Seal Cove.Florentine Manor (800-665-2271, www.sn2000.nb.ca/comp/florentine-manor-bb), between Hopewell Cape and Fundy National Park, is a grand old shipbuilder's mansion in a rural setting. They do a mean lob ster feast. Rooms begin at $60.In St. Andrews, the epicenter of resort life is the grand Fairmont Algonquin (800-257-7544, www.fairmont .com/algonquin), a sprawling Tudor resort overlooking the town, with rates starting at $135 in summer.■WHAT TO DO: To experience the Bay of Fundy’s signature massive tides, go to Hopewell Rocks. The park offers paddling tours of the offshore rock formations at high tides, and then you walk the same ground when the 50-foot tide retreats. Admission: $4. The park opens mid-May; be sure to check the tide tables beforehand. Info: 877-734-3429, WWW.the hopewellrocks.ca.In St. Andrews, the lush Kingsbrae Gardens (866-566-8687, www.kingsbraegarden.com; $5) are worth half a day.And while whale-wratching trips abound around the Bay of Fundy, the majestic gaff-rigged cutter Cory made our trip especially interesting. Rates are about $35 for adults, $24 for kids under 16. Details: 506-529-8116, www.townsearch.com/svcory.INFORMATION: Tourism New' Brunswick, 800-561-0123, www.tourismnew brunswick.ca.of seawater. Kayakers had been paddling around the groves of oddly shaped pillars, toweringBy Steve HendrixThe Washington PostIt takes about a day to figure out what is WTong with New Brunswick, the sleepy Canadian province that sits atop Maine like a bushy toupee. The highways are wide and kempt — and as empty as a newrbom interstate. The towns are clapboard and compact, full of charm and as of yet free of the litter of corporate signage that clutters American business strips. The locals are pleasant and welcoming to the point — you begin to worry — of naivete.It all seems perfect. But something is off. It's too colorful. Clearly, New Brunswnck should be in black and white. This is the Fred MacMurray of provinces, the Saturday matinee of destinations. My family and I cross from Calais, Maine, into New Brunswick on a bright August morning and promptly shed about five decades. The lightly peopled Canadian side of the St. Croix River makes even Maine seem like a teeming metro-plex. There's a mere cul-de-sac's worth of traffic along the main route northeast, Highw’ay 1, w'hich is leafy with prime Acadian forests to the west and tapers eastward down to the rocky Atlantic Coast.Our odyssey that will take us from an island full of working fishing villages to the maritime spectacle of the Bay of Fundy's biggest-in-the-world tides to the cultural oddity of St. Andrews, a comely resort town founded by reverse refugees from the United States in the 18th century'.Grand Manan — our first stop— is the largest of the islands strung across the entrance4 to the Bay of Fundy. It s 16 miles long and home to about 1,000 year-round fisherfamilies. In the summer, the ferries from Blacks Harbour fill with bird watchers and tourists — largely from Toronto and Montreal — and Grand Manan temporarily converts into an isolated vacation retreat and an open-air museum of coastal culture. We pass a misty browTi smudge on the southern horizon and Dave MacKinnon, an off-season lobsterman leaning over the ferry rail, identifies it as Campobello, the Fundy island where Franklin Roosevelt kept a summer home. Later, he points out three dolphin running along the ferry’s bow' wave.We head south along the east shore to Seal Cove, the heart of Grand Manan’s fishing industry. On the ocean side of the coastal road, wre pass small harbors with boats aground in the low’ tide. On the inland side, there are broad meadows speckled with wildflow-ers. Beyond them, we can just see the rise of the forested cliffs we will explore by foot in coming days. • VTourist businesses are few, except for a cluster of museums, kayak outfitters and gift shops near the ferry terminal and the many modest frame homes doing seasonal duty as guest houses.At Seal Cove, wre found an art director's dream of a New England shantytown tucked into a deep notch of shoreline. Twin church steeples rise above the helter-skelter of sardine sheds, dock houses and, just offshore, the tilted, net-draped pilings of the herring pens. A whole compound of weathered and dignified smokehouses have been restored— by a New York artist, no less — into a delightful museum of the sardine industry.On the advice of Tammy Brown, our innkeeper at Beach Front Cottages, we gather periwinkles along the way to be steamed and consumed with butter on the porch of our cabin overlooking the water. We eat the unlikely shellfish dinner and listen to the artillery boom of the tide up and down the shore. The lights of Seal Cove twinkle on,and we congratulate ourselves for being on this spot at this moment.Three days later, back on the mainland, we are again marveling at the tide, but this time it's not booming so much as attacking us. We're at Hopewell Rocks, a state park about five hours up the coast from the Maine border.On the way up we had detoured through amiable Saint John, New Bruns-wick's largest city, and the vast maritime forests of Fundy National Park. But we’re spending an entire day at Hopewell Cape, the epicenter of the world's highest tides.stone mushrooms carved by eons of rushing tides. Now the kelpforests are all draped limply over the rocks and tourists pick their way between the pillars and over the exposed floor of the bay.We re beginning to pick a littlenervously, though, because the phenomenal Bay of Fundy tide has bottomed out, turned and is beginning its rapid climb back up, rising five stories in about six hours.Twice a day, the bay is flushed by the most powerful tides on the planet, rushing in and out at the rate of 25 million cubic meters per second, equivalent to the combined flow of all the rivers in theworld, according to the breathless promotional brochures. At spots around the bay, the tidal bores and riptides are so strong you can ride them in motorized rafts like whitewater rapids.Now it's on the way back, and we scamper over the rocks and through the tidal caves with a little more urgency as the bay reclaims yard after yard of bottom.We climb up into the woods and turn to watch the tide’s twice-daily rout of the lowlands. The flood complete, we head back to a lobster dinner at the Florentine Manor, a restored country inn set among the bayside farms.Our final stop takes us back to our earliest New Brunswick era: St. Andrews, a coastal village originally founded by British loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. In 1783, when colonists faithful to King George III realized the upstart Americans had actually carried off their rash rebellion, a few hundred of them from New England simply stepped across the St. Croix River and remained subjects of the crown.In the centuries since, St. Andrews has evolved into a tri-cultural resort town. Bunched around a tight grid on Passama-quoddy Bay, St. Andrews is the doppelganger of many a quaint Yankee harbor town. Georgian, Federal and neoclassical homes sit on neat, broad lots between perfectly spaced streets.This is four-star New Brunswick, a weekend and summer retreat of fine dining and upscale hotels in the wray of Bar Harbor, Maine. It makes for a comfortable end to our Canadian week.We set up in the center of resort life, the venerable Algonquin Hotel, a sprawling Tudor behemoth stretching for blocks above the downtown. It's another time warp: The bellmen greet us in kilts, the infinite verandas are crowded with genteel folk in rocking chairs, and there is actually a wait for croquet on the front lawn.According to that clock, it's nearly 8 on a bright sunny morning in the 21st century. But something about this town, and this province, suggests that it’s much,When we arrived, these gravel fiats were under a fewr billion tonsKatherineMeagherSlinky byPICADILLYJackets, shells, slacks, skirtsSm, med, large, x-largeFabulous for travel -washable, no wrinkles!much earlier.Laser VisionCorrection of NearsightednessFarsightedness AstigmatismLASIK SURGERY At Competitive FeesBERKSHIRE EYE CENTER, P.C.740 Williams Street • Pittsfield, MA413-445-4564 • Financing availableSTATE LINE SERVICE CO./FREE ESTI MATESNatural/PropaneGasSennce24 Hour Emergency Service•Tune-Ups ‘Boilers• Furnaces • Water HeatersElectric to Gas or Oil ConversionsRichmond, MA 01254413-698-3351k
Newspaper Details
The Berkshire Eagle
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, US
Sun, Apr 06, 2003
Page 38
Full Page
Clipped by
Kevin S.
CA 24 Feb 2018
Other Publications Near Pittsfield, Massachusetts
Pittsfield Evening Eagle
Berkshire County Eagle
Berkshire Eagle
The Berkshire Eagle
Pittsfield Berkshire Evening Eagle
