The title stakes my turf right away. Let's be completely clear: the biggest port city in New Brunswick is Saint John, and don't you DARE try to put an "s" on the end of it. The capital of Newfoundland is St. John's, and don't even think of spelling the first word out in full.
This business of naming places after saints -- I tell ya! It's just like what I ran into a while back on a Caribbean cruise, when I spent a day touring the island of St. John in the U. S. Virgin Islands and then sailed through the night to dock at the capital city of St. John's on the island of Antigua. Aaack! What we really need is for someone in the Roman Catholic Church to name every single one of the 11,000 Holy Virgins who were martyred along with St. Ursula, and then we can really have a different saint's name for every place that wants one all to itself!
Here in Canada, convention has long since fixed the names in these forms: Saint John NB and St. John's NF. Say what you mean, mean what you say (as my father liked to tell me).
My two night (or 48-hour) stay in Saint John turned into about 44 hours of fog and some sun each afternoon between 4:30 PM and 6:30 PM. This made it more than a little difficult to make a clear visual record of the city. Nevertheless, here are a few pictures.
The most famous tourist attraction of Saint John is the Reversing Falls. Strictly speaking, more a set of rapids than a waterfall, but the gigantic tides of the Bay of Fundy are more than capable of making the Saint John River flow backwards at high tide. Here are two pictures, the first at or near low tide one afternoon, and the second about half an hour after peak high tide the following (foggy) morning. The change in the action and direction of the river around the big rock outcropping is unmistakable.
Most of downtown Saint John today is a Victorian city, a series of streets full of brick and stone buildings dating from some time in the 1800s. As in Charlottetown, there are a few modern buildings aggressively altering the cityscape. But in the main, the look remains Victorian -- inside as well as outside.
It's super-easy to establish an olde-style British pub in Saint John, and there's a great selection of pubs of all kinds to prove it.
Like many harbour cities (Halifax and St. John's to name a couple), Saint John slopes steeply uphill from the water's edge. Take this into account when planning walking tours. My hotel (the Delta Brunswick) was a scant two blocks walking uphill from the harbour but this, by my calculation, adds up to about 45-50 steps in a staircase.
Down at the water's edge, the Market Square brings together a row of Victorian warehouse buildings with an indoor shopping mall behind the historic façades, and a chain of great restaurants with eye-catching patios outside the south front of the complex. I had a magnificent salmon dinner at Grannan's, a classic steak and seafood restaurant which I fondly remember from my last visit in 16 years ago.
Outside the Market Square stands this odd-looking bit of public art. I didn't see an explanatory sign or plaque but I'm guessing it's meant as a modern-day comic interpretation of the traditional "market cross" found in many old English towns.
Now, look carefully at the corner where the glass atrium meets the brick of the original buildings, and you'll see a gent with his phone, tucked into the corner, doing his own comic riff on the sculpture -- except I'm willing to bet he was completely unaware of the resemblance.
The last leg of my trip took me from Saint John back to Halifax with two important stopping places along the way. This was another single-day marathon that might better have been split into 2 parts.
The first leg took me northeast on Highway 1 towards Moncton. This is a beautifully-built 4-lane freeway which swoops up and down the high hills of southern New Brunswick with insouciant ease. At Sussex I met the first of two junctions with Highway 114. I hung on for the second exit, another 13 kilometres east. At this point, Highway 114 took me southeast towards the village of Alma. After driving 20 kilometres, I came to the boundary of Fundy National Park. As usual, there's a side pull-over lane with a ticket booth.
Just past the ticket booth is Wolfe Lake, with a campground on one bank and a public picnic/swimming area for day visitors on the other side. I was fascinated by the interplay of vegetation and water beside the beach.
A few kilometres farther into the park brought me to Bennett Lake, a reservoir contained by a sizable rock-faced dam (perhaps with an earthen interior). I had a nice 25-minute walk here on two of the trails. Again, there's a picnic and beach area, as well as some longer hiking trails leading to back-country camping places -- which must be reserved in advance.
On the beach, the park has adopted a noteworthy goose-control strategy. It works because wild geese that have not yet become fully adapted to urban living do not like to be out of sight of their safety zone, the body of water.
You can see that it was a fairly windy day, both from the whitecaps on the lake and from the billowing of the goose screens.
Behind the dam is the carcass of an old rusted spillway, long disused. The modern dam includes a short, straight concrete spillway at the north end. I wonder if this one could have been intended as a log chute?
As you continue southeast through the park, the road keeps rolling up and down hills, and on one crest I passed a sign indicating "363 m." as presumably the highest elevation on the road. Not long after that, I saw "Slow Down" and "Steep Hill" warning signs, but none advising me to gear down. At the end of the first long descent, there's a curve to the left and a viewpoint that gives this view out over the Bay of Fundy. I was obviously still a long way up, but definitely going to get all the way down in a hurry now. Gearing down was essential.
The steep, straight grade below the lookout ended in a "45 km/h" sharp hairpin bend to the right. Don't say I didn't warn you. There follow a series of back and forth turns, and you'll be riding your brakes all the way if you didn't gear down.
But then the road levels off, and there follow a whole series of turnoffs leading to the golf course, the visitor centre, and Point Wolfe Road. Take that last one, and soon you'll see a road on the left marked "Swimming." Fundy National Park has the last big outdoor swimming pool and change house built in a national park, and it's unusual to say the least. The pool sits on a low bluff right beside the Bay of Fundy, and the bay's water is channelled into a pumping system to keep the pool's water level up, with the massive tides doing most of the work. Obviously, then, a salt water pool, but a very refreshing stopover point if you're visiting the park on a hot summer day. I'd have made time for it (I've done so a couple of times in the past) if it weren't closed for the season. Sigh. Here's an internet photo in the summer season.
A couple of kilometres farther along the Point Wolfe Road, there's a turn marked "Dickson Falls Trail." Even if you don't want to walk the 1-kilometre trail, you should stop here for the viewpoint just off the parking lot. It's as dramatic a seacoast view as I've ever seen anywhere.
If I'd gotten on the road earlier in the morning, I'd have kept going all the way to the end of the road, about 20 minutes farther along, where there's a beautiful wild beach along the mouth of a stream. From the Dickson Falls Trail, I backtracked to the main road, and downhill past one or two more bends -- and suddenly, I was on the main street of Alma. This lobster fishing village is also thoroughly conditioned by the tourist trade, with inns, restaurants, and shops, all right at the eastern gate of the park.
Highway 114 continues eastwards, mostly inland and away from the coast, through a series of farming landscapes and forested areas, until I reached the village of Hopewell Cape. Keep alert here because you get only one brief warning sign, and then you're at the turnoff for Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park.
The system here is very different from the National Park. Parking is free, but then there is a per-person admission charge to the park. As of 2021, this was $14.00 for adults and $12.00 for seniors and students, with kidlets at $8.00. You should go as far along the road as possible before turning into the parking area, since the ticket office and entrance is at the very far end of the parking areas. You'll also see a large sign announcing the high and low tide times for the day.
Hopewell Rocks is perhaps the only place I've visited where "rush hour" happens at a different time every day. That's because large numbers of people want the thrill of walking on the ocean floor at low tide, and the tide times keep shifting every day. I arrived about an hour and half after high tide and the park was correspondingly not very busy. I was able to park very close to the entrance. Another four hours and it could have been a very different story.
The walking trails give access to several different viewpoints over different areas of rock formations. This picture from the park's signboard shows what the entire dramatic stretch of coastline looks like in an aerial view.
The park runs golf carts on a reserved gravel roadway, to carry visitors who need or want assistance from the ticket office down to the most northerly set of formations. I used it, again because of time shortage. I had to pay $2.00 extra each way for this service, on top of the admission fee.
So here are my pictures to show what the rocks look like at about 3/4 of full tide. I was able to walk down all the stairs except for the final flight down to the actual beach. The last picture shows how the supporting structure for the stairs has been neatly fitted into a sizable crevice between one of the newer formations and the mainland.
From Hopewell, it takes about 40-45 minutes to drive to Moncton. Since your admission is good for two consecutive days, this would be a good excuse to stay in Moncton, come out to the Rocks for high tide one day and for low tide the next day -- or something of that sort. Tide times can be easily found online, and not just for this location. I used this online site to pin down the tide times for the Reversing Falls at Saint John too.
After I left Hopewell, I made a beeline for Halifax via Moncton and Truro, with only a brief Timmy break for a late lunch in Moncton. I arrived in Halifax right on the mark of eight hours after I'd left Saint John, whereas the direct time by the fastest route is supposed to be under 4 hours. A long, tiring day, then, but absolutely worth it.
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