Much joking is made in Canada about how New Brunswick is the province you drive through, to get to PEI or Nova Scotia. We’ve certainly done it enough times! But this year, we chose NB as our vacation destination. Specifically, we went to the largest island in the Bay of Fundy (home of the world’s biggest tides), Grand Manan.
A friend who lives in New Brunswick and knows how much I love PEI told me many years ago that I should give Grand Manan a try. It is much smaller than PEI (you can drive tip-to-tip in about 35 minutes) and much less tourist-infested. We were looking for sea, sunshine, rocks and family time, and Grand Manan was the perfect choice for us.
It’s about a 14 hour drive from Ottawa to Grand Manan, so to save our sanity we chose a spot about 2/3 of the way for an overnight pit stop. We found possibly the most delightful hotel room we’ve ever encountered: we stayed in a refurbished vintage CP Rail passenger car. Adventure on the Rails is part of the Shogomoc Railway Site in Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick. It is a fully contained and completely private hotel room with three beds, a kitchenette (fully stocked with breakfast), a seating area and a spacious bathroom. It was such a delightful surprise – possibly the most comfortable beds I’ve ever had in any hotel room, and only a little bit more expensive than the nearby generic highway-stop hotels.
Here’s my video, taken after a very long and stressful day of driving:
(I particularly love my family’s antics on this one, because it really had been a wretchedly stressful drive and they were hamming a bit specifically to make me laugh. And then when I asked my youngest, Lucas, to take a photo of me and I sat posing prettily on the train car, I couldn’t figure out why he was chortling with laughter when he took the photo – until I saw my eldest in the window of the photo. I love them so much!)
Grand Manan is an island, and you have to take a ferry to get there. I’d booked us late morning tickets, thinking we could do some fun exploring of an area we’ve zoomed through nearly a dozen times but never taken the time to explore. I thought maybe an early lunch at the Noah’s Ark cafe or a visit to Potato World might be fun. Who doesn’t want to go to a potato museum? But alas, I got my timing wrong and we found ourselves in quite a pinch for time with only time to do a quick stop at the covered bridge I’d been meaning to visit for years, the one that is the inspiration for the delicious Covered Bridge chips. And that’s how we learned that there is more than one covered bridge in the area, because we accidentally found a different one. It was the one we needed to find, though, and we had just enough time to take a few photos.
The time was a little (lot) tighter than I would have liked as we barrelled through southern New Brunswick on tiny two-lane highways with an unstable and often non-existing cell signal, but we made it to the ferry landing on time and boarded for the beautiful crossing to Grand Manan.
And that’s where I’ll pick up the story in my next post!