Bathurst, New Brunswick

We got an early start; had a little longer journey planned, although as the day progressed, we shortened it. We had the time change for Atlantic time too so we had to set our watches ahead an hour.

Our drive took us along the north side of Chaleur Bay in Quebec. This bay is ranked as one of the most beautiful bays in the world. We’re not sure who gets to vote on that ranking although we would agree there is some beautiful coastline along here. Our GPS was suggesting we take a little swim, or a ride on a ferry, so we overrode that idea; it’s expensive to put a 60 ft. rig on a ferry around here. Our GPS (Miss Jilly) gets frustrated when Joe disobeys her so I shut her off for a while so she wasn’t trying to re-direct us back to the ferry. Our plan was to take the road route to the Interprovincial Bridge at Point a la Croix. Here we said goodbye to Quebec after a fabulous 29-day stay.

The entry town to New Brunswick is Campbellton and we scooted into the Visitor Center for a break. We took Foxy for a walk along the boardwalk and took some pictures. The most obvious change to tell us we’re in a new province, of course, was all the road signs are now in both languages, with English first and then French. Somehow, it’s a little easier for us to read these; our eyes are more acclimated to look at the top words on road signs and, while we understood most of them in French, it’s just one less thing to focus on while driving down the road. The other obvious thing is everyone speaks English and the most reassuring thing for Hannah is the telephone was jingling with messages as we have found Rogers again and the cell phone is roaming. While Joe drove on up the road, I was catching up on a week’s worth of text messages and voice messages.

On the New Brunswick side we drove on the south side of Chaleur Bay and then we hit the freeway to make a little better time. In the meantime, I phoned the targeted campground in Caraquet and they had no sites to accommodate a rig our size. I called two other campgrounds, one had 15 amp and water and the other was shaded. We can’t run on 15 amp and we wanted access to the satellite so we made a change of plans and stopped early at Bathurst, about 40 miles from Caraquet.

The campground is really nice, very quiet, with 50 amp full hook-ups and we’re not sure we’ve ever had such personal service when we’ve checked into an RV park. The owner came over two or three times to be sure everything was OK and, of course, it was. We picked her brain for a place to get some supper and ran out to get a bite to eat. I phoned my sister and talked to Mom. Now, we’re settled in here for a couple of days. As I write this, it’s raining again, but the forecast is not too bad for the next couple of days.

Jul 24, 2009

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