Sunday, May 20, 2012

Day 20

We left Quebec City and started heading towards the border of New Brunswick. We hit our first major milestone as we passed the 1000 km mark. By the end of the day, in St. Jean de Port Joli, there wasn't  much for suitable camping grounds so we just found a random store, "Beer and Wines of the World" and set up camp deep in their back yard behind some trees and bushes.

The next day we said goodbye to the St. Lawrence river and started heading east towards the New Brunswick border where we were going to hug the border of Maine as well. We also saw a bridge where we managed to cross over to US soil. There were some rumblings about turning our trans-Canada trip into a trans-continental trip, and we could tell that the locals of Pohenegamook were starting to get extremely excited about the prospect of us doing so, but after briefly and intensely considering it we quickly put an end to those rumours and kept our eyes on the trans-Canada prize.


but when the locals demanded a photo-op on the bridge to Maine anyway, we politely obliged

The day after we finally hit the border of New Brunswick around 4:00 pm. However, the day was not over and we ended up in Edmunston camping in a vacant lot near some subdivisions (people either really don't observe their surroundings or just don't care).Our tent was actually set up a baseball throw away from the trans-Canada highway and the city Edmunston. Crossing into New Brunswick is significant for us. Will has never been east of Quebec city before, and this was also Harry's first time in NB.

After a night of some thunderstorms we woke up to find that the rain had stopped. Again the hills kept getting larger but by the end of the day we made it to Perth-Andover. We were lucky enough to have an offer to sleep in a vacant home by a landlady in town. There was a very serious flood in the town about a month earlier and as a result a few of her rooms were available. (Video coming soon)

The next day we were well rested from sleeping on beds and we began our two day journey to Fredericton (total of 160 km). We made really good time and had some tailwind when we found a very nice place to camp just a few kilometers outside of Millville around 6:00 pm. The black flies were pretty rough but we managed to keep them outside of the tent for the most part.


Our campground in Millville

Our last day before our rest day in Fredericton would only be a total of 60 kms. We managed to arrive in Fredericton for lunch at 12:30. From there it was only a short distance to our lodgings for the night (thanks to Mark Browning for lending us two rooms for the night).

The rest day was very relaxing, but we were unable to run some errands we planned on doing because of the long weekend. Thank you to John and Jennifer for the hospitality, it felt great to be rejuvenated with some warm supper and clean laundry.

Turns out New Brunswick is in a different timezone, something people are referring to as an "Atlantic" time zone. But we've never heard of that before so we're pretty sure they're just making it up, those jokesters. 

wait, it does kind of look like we traveled through time as we stood on the border. 
looks like half-past handsome-o'clock.