St. John and Moncton

Thursday, May 10, 2018--St. John to Moncton

We ate breakfast and made it to the Reversing Falls area just as the event was beginning.  There is a small falls just where the St. John River enters the Bay of Fundy.  But the Bay of Fundy has such high tides that as it reaches the level of the river swirls occur because of the push of the bay's tide against the river's flow.  As a part of this process, occasionally, the tide rises high enough to actually reverse the flow of the river which results in a tide bore--a raised edge of water moving upriver due to the higher tides than the height of the river.  But most days are like today when the result was simply that the falls disappear because the tide raises the water level of the bay to be about even in height to the top of the falls causing both the falls to disappear and accompanying swirls as the two sets of moving water battled each other.  It was fun to see it happening even though it isn't the dramatic event that everyone hopes it will be.

From there, we headed to the Irving Nature Park--a spit of land going out into the Bay of Fundy that has been left in its natural state and that has trails for hiking.  We hiked a trail around the top of the small mountain there--through the woods with the sounds of a woodpecker and other birds and with occasional lookout points to see the bay on one side of the spit and the bogs on the other side.  Then we did a driving trail that took us all the way to the end of the spit and back.  Finally, we hiked out the wooden walkway over the bogs where there were shorebirds.

After returning to the hotel to checkout, we headed to the downtown area of St. John.  It's a small downtown area confined within a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water.  It has some impressive old buildings, but it is mostly a rather dead downtown.  There are lots of people living in the area, though, but many of the commercial buildings have seen better days in terms of being occupied by important or popular businesses.  The best thing we saw was the City Market which is the oldest continuing market in all of Canada.

After that, we took the highway to our next destination--Moncton, which is one of the more thriving cities in New Brunswick.  It isn't a great tourist town, but it was the best place for us to stay before heading out tomorrow on the next leg of our sightseeing.  We are in a great apartment I rented through AIRBNB--Downtown Two-Bedroom Apartment.

In the evening, we walked through the downtown area of Moncton which is alive with restaurants and bars and which has lots of buildings housing offices of companies.  The city seems so much more lively than St. John.  And there are signed of continued improvement we saw--a new arena being completed soon, a new multi-story office building going up, etc.  Every storefront we passed while walking at least 8-10 blocks along Main Street was filled.  That's unusual for a downtown street these days.