Sea Caves, Covered Bridges and the Hopewell Rocks

Saturday, July 6 to Thursday, July 11 – Days 18 to 23

Penobsquis, Kings County , New Brunswick

The “tranny transplant” had been posted previously, so I won’t discuss that at length.  Just to get things into the proper chronology…The truck transmission “went south” for us on Saturday afternoon.  We spent the balance of Saturday and Sunday brooding about what we should do next.  We decided that on the following Monday, July 8 we would rent a car and do some touring while we waited for the truck to get fixed.  We rented a Kia Sportage, which was cheap at only $35 dollars a day – no mileage charges.  It was fairly roomy and easy to get in and out of.  The only complaint that I had was the steering tended to be a bit “twitchy” for me.

  We travelled to the tiny, coastal, fishing village of St. Martin via Fundy National Park.  We didn’t spend lots of time in the park but it looks like a great place for hikers.  We had tried to time our trip so that it coincided with low tide that afternoon but it turned out that we were a couple of hours early before we could get into the sea caves.  We decided to catch a couple of covered bridges located on the edge of town.  Kings County has the most covered bridges of any place in Canada and over the course of the few days that we were here we saw six of them.  The reason that they built covered bridges was to protect to wooden beams and bridge decking. They proved most popular though as romantic hide-aways.

We then proceeded to the Fundy Trail, it is a hiking, biking, driving trail that follows the shoreline of the Bay of Fundy.  It starts just east of St. Martin and runs for about 11 Km one way.  We stopped at most of the scenic lookouts into the bay and they were quite spectacular.

 

By the time we returned to St. Martin the tide had gone out and we were able to walk to the sea caves. Really quite neat. The picture on the left shows one of the caves when we arrived – the picture on the right shows the same cave at low tide with people walking on the beach at its mouth.

 

The Hopewell Rocks is one of the prime attractions on the Bay of Fundy.  Again to really appreciate them you should try to see them at both high and low tides. We were fortunate enough to have the time to do this. In fact they sell tickets that are good for two consecutive days. There are two highs and two lows in 24 hours and 52 minutes – the difference between a high & a low is about 6 hours and 13 minutes. You can walk on the ocean floor 3 hours before and 3 hours after the low tide.  These formations are called the “Flower Pots”.  At left you can see people walking around and through the arches; on the left you could paddle through on a kayak – as many people sign-up to do.

 

The Fundy tides are the highest in the world due to the shape of the bay, which becomes shallower and narrower the further up the bay you go.  The volume of water that rushes into the bay twice a day is approximately 100 cubic Kilometers. I suppose for Maritimers this is just an everyday occurrence but for this couple from the prairies it is absolutely amazing.