A bit of travel background with hint of rant

Several people have asked, why a month in New Brunswick? Were you visiting family?

No, as far as we know, neither of us have any family there, and don't know anyone that lives there. We know people that have connections there, but that's not the same.

When we went to Newfoundland last year, we had been sort of thinking about going back to New Zealand. This was discussion in 2023, when there were still concerns about COVID, and there was a big cyclone in February that year. Even though they said they were open to tourists, we weren't so sure we wanted to go to a place that was recently a disaster zone. 

In any case, we'd been wanting to see more of Canada, and I'd always wanted to go to L'Anse aux Meadows. Sort of the same reasoning, this year, since my only time in New Brunswick was on an overnight train trip from Montreal to Halifax, and I didn't think that really counted. Plus doing our thing about supporting Canadian businesses, but that's a whole other rant.

Plus with good planning we'd be able to get in a visit to PEI as well, and Linda is really good at good planning for trips. I often think she should have become a travel agent rather than doing accounting. Just as an aside, on the map these look like small places compared to the rest of Canada. They are not. St John's to L'Anse aux Meadows would be a full day's driving, complete with the stress of watching for moose. In New Brunswick we stayed along the Acadian and Fundy coasts, between St Martin (about 20 minutes east of Saint John, up to Kouchibouguac Park, with one expedition as far north as Miscou Island. That's about a 4 or 5 hour drive, and there's lots more of New Brunswick to see inland and along the St. Lawrence coast. 

So now between work, vacation, and photo tours I've visited the easy parts of Canada. Of course there are vast tracts of land I haven't seen. North West Territories, Nunavut, northern Quebec, Labrador (we talked about taking the ferry from St Barbe to Blanc Sablon (~2 hrs) so we could say we'd been to Labrador, but decided not to because one of Linda's buddies did just that and had the weather change abruptly and so they ended up with a really expensive car rental fee and unplanned air travel expenses.), and the Arctic islands are still to be seen, and I'd like to. I think.

So let's see, within Canada the furthest west is Forty Mile (near Dawson City), furthest north is the Arctic Circle near Eagle Plains Yukon, the furthest east is Cape Spear, Newfoundland, and furthest south is Windsor, coming back from a road trip to buy a car in Winnipeg. It's a long story that I'm pretty sure involves my father doing a complicated favour for someone.

However, there are some issues in seeing much of the rest. Flying to Yellowknife, Inuvik, or even Tuktoyaktuk is straightforward if expensive, but like going to Whitehorse, that isn't really the place. One needs to get out and explore, and that gets difficult quite quickly. The rest of the places are even harder, since there isn't really much of a there, there, to fly to, unless you're in the military or government. Going as a tourist, especially carrying lots of photo gear starts requiring serious money and lots of planning.

Plus, and this is something I'm coming to discover about myself, I'm becoming more of a homebody than a traveler. My friend Sean has been doing lots of travel lately, most recently to Algeria, as you can see on his blog here. Just reading about some of the procedures to cross the various borders has me feeling anxious. I don't deal well with that amount and kinds of stress now, if I ever did.

I travelled a fair bit as a kid (airline pilot father, if you hadn't known) and loved being in airports. But now, to be perfectly blunt about it, airports and commercial airplanes are a shitty place to be. Everything about air travel now sucks rancid slough water, and that's before the concerns about climate change and Kafkaesque border guards.

So enough of the blah blah blah, I hear you saying. What about the photos? I've got the October IotM tentatively picked out, and I don't like to repeat them so close to putting them in the blog during the month, so that's restricting my choices a bit. Let's do some colourful intentional camera movement. I take a scene like this, 

or this,

and through some camera magic get this.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NB)

Film

Linda, not in New Brunswick. This is in K country.

Newfoundland

New Brunswick

I liked finding hits of red in unexpected places.

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago and Flower. In case you haven't figured it out, I did lots of flower photos in August. The lilies did really well this year, lasting into October. 

Landscape

Dino related

The promised Hopewell rocks blog

Get a drink and buckle your seatbelt. This is a long one. Rather than split it into 2 or 3 parts, I boiled the 100 some edited photos down to 37, which is a lot of photos for a blog. I dropped the Of the Day feature just for today, to try to reduce photo overload. Some of the other photos might show up in the Of the Day feature.

Some scene setting. Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park is about a half hour drive down the Fundy coast from Moncton. Being in the Bay of Fundy the tides are enormous. Millenia of wave action erode the softer rocks, leaving these pillars of somewhat harder rock, sometimes with vegetation clinging to life on top. The tide height means it's possible to walk on the ocean floor and look up at the pillars of rock. A few hours later one can kayak around the high tide marks and get a completely different view of the rocks. In a couple of the photos you might see some park staff who are acutely aware of the tides, and gently herd the unwary back to the access stairs.

We got there pretty much at low tide. The ocean floor is mostly rock and gravel, with a bit of mud. We wore our regular walking shoes, and didn't have any problems staying dry. Some people wore rubber boots and could be a bit more adventurous in their explorations. We had lots of time for a fairly thorough exploration, then went for lunch. The cafe is excellent! Our meal was certainly in the top 3 for our trip.

We did a bit of strolling on the other trails, then went back to the viewpoint to watch the tide come in. It's quite impressive, in a quietly inexorable way. As you'll see, if you get trapped you have a big problem.

As one of my photo buddies says, "Of all the places to get great photos, this is one of them." Seriously, if you're in New Brunswick anywhere near the Fundy shore, this is a must do. Making a trip to see Cape Enrage, and revisiting Hopewell Rocks, is something I'd consider, and plan it around tides, and time of day for dramatic photos. Oh, and the Caves Restaurant, that too.

1. The view from the top of the stairs. There are 101 stairs, like a 5 or 6 story building's worth, depending on how you count. My camera timestamp is 7:25. I didn't bother changing it for the trip. The park is only open certain hours, which sometimes restricts what exploration can be done. I saw one set of northern lights photos over the rocks, so the photographer must have made a special deal with the park staff.

2. Part way down the access stairs. 

3. From the bottom of the stairs. I didn't even try to get photos without people in them. If they were "in the shot" I took it anyways. Plus it gave a sense of scale. I sort of thought about getting the tripod and doing the photos as long exposures, which would make most of the people invisible, but then you get people trails, which would be distracting. 

4.

5. Arches, with Linda giving a sense of scale.

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7. Eventually, sooner rather than later in geologic time, that slender base will erode away and the rock will topple over.

8. The rock shapes are fascinating.

9. Lots of places are blocked off by these warning signs. The rocks are soft enough they could be damaged by people climbing on them. Or some geologic thing happens and the rock falls off the cliff at an unexpected time. That would be bad if you're underneath.

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14. At the far end, they build an emergency escape stair, just in case. You can just see an observation deck above it, but the two are not connected. You'll stay dry, but you have to wait for the tide to go out again. This is the end of the normally accessible part of the beach. If you're into some serious scrambling you can go a bit further. At the other end it kind of settles into a not so interesting mud flat. I didn't turn on my walk tracker thingie, so I've no idea how far one can walk along the beach. 

15.

16. The shark fin rock.  I managed to get this photo between two family groups that were posing around it.

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20. Another photographer working the scene. You can see that trying to scramble up the cliff to escape the incoming tide is an act of futility.

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23. There's all sorts of little nooks and crannies, large and small, some are blocked off, and some you can walk into.

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25. Vegetation clings to nearly every crack and crevice.

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29. The tide is starting to come in. Camera time stamp is 8:37. 

30. 8:46.

31. 8:53

32. 9:07

33. 9:17. The tour group is listening to a park staff person talking about the park. They are only a few meters from the bottom of the stairs.

34. We went to explore some of the other trails and had lunch, then came back to the top of the stairs. Timestamp 11:04

35. 11:06

36. I walked down to the bottom of the stairs and kind of leaned over the chain that blocked of the next set of risers. The staff person watched with amusement, but wouldn't let me go down to the next landing. The water really is that kind of disgusting muddy brown.

37. 11:11 as we left, not quite high tide. We could have come back the next day, since the ticket is good for 2 consecutive days. Lots of people plan their visits to have one day at low tide, and one at high, to skip the transition. I thought of doing the tripod thing, maybe doing some really long exposure film photos, hoping for really nice light and not a lot of people, but in the end the next day we went to the beach.