Thursday – August 2, 2018
Maine & LL Bean
I don’t think you can go to Freeport Maine and not visit the big LL Bean store. It certainly is large and of course you have to pose with the boot! You can shop anytime as it is still open 24 hours / day. We didn’t go on the trip to shop there but managed to spend an hour and still had money in the wallet when we left.
We continued to Bangor and got the first lobster roll of the trip. It was good! I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunity for seafood on this journey. Bangor was also quite hot, around 90 degrees.
New Brunswick
We continued up north and finally reached Calias which connects to St. Stephen, New Brunswick Canada. We went through on a narrow crossing to the single immigration booth. After some questions we were on our way. We were the only car crossing there. Waze was smart enough to take us to the emptier of the the two crossings. There we stopped at the Chocolate Museum which covered the history of the Ganong Bros. company in St. Stephen. We were a little underwhelmed with the museum but we did enjoy buying some chocolate afterward.
We headed to St. John New Brunswick to check out the Reversing Falls / Rapids. This is where the St. John River goes into the Bay of Fundy. The river normally flows into the bay but at high tides things reverse. When we arrived we found ourselves wrapped in a fog and the temperature had dropped to the high 60’s. We also discovered we arrived at about the time of the slack tide. This meant the flow was fairly equalized so not much was happening with the water. I did see some plants I found interesting so got to take some pictures of them with the new zoom lens. We weren’t going to hang around so we figured we would continue to our lodging in St. Martins to get settled and get some dinner as it was already pushing 7:30PM.
Wild rose buds 
Goldenrod – T6s 1/320 sec. f/5 234mm (x1.6) ISO 320
For those interested in the technical aspect of pictures I’m using the following camera equipment.
- Canon EOS 6D Camera
- Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM Lens (usually on 6D)
- Canon Rebel T6s
- Canon EF 100-400mm F4.5-5.6L IS II USM Lens (usually on T6s)
- Canon EF-S 18-85mm IS
- Canon Speedlite 430EX II Flash
- B+W 77MM (MC) NATURAL CLR #007 FILTER
- B+W 77mm XS-Pro HTC Kaesemann Circular Polarizer with Multi-Resistant Nano
- Hoya Pro 1 67mm Circular Polarizer and Clear Filters
The 6D is a full frame sensor and the T6s is a crop sensor so any lens on that camera is effectively 1.6x more zoom than indicated. This turns the 100-400mm lens into a 160-640mm and the 18-85mm into about 28-135MM. This is the first trip for the long zoom lens and I’m hoping it helps me get some good pictures of whales or icebergs.
St. Martins
We made our way to the Salmon River Bed & Breakfast in St. Martins. To our surprise the 5 or 6 restaurants in town were all closed. The Tex-Mex place that is part of our B&B closed at 7PM! We ended going to this small general store to get some things for sandwiches. We ate them at dusk on our third floor deck overlooking the bay.
During our search for food we saw the tide was getting pretty low when we found some boats without water. It was getting dark so better views would have to wait until morning.
That was all for Thursday. We traveled 324 miles over 5 hours & 42 minutes for a total of 627 miles.
We have wild roses out west, and in fact, my province was called “the wild rose province” at one point. I wonder about subspecies, because the rose hips on ours are more fully rounded, even oblong in the opposite axis.
About the restaurants, it is hard to say what was up with that, but I’ve found that Canadian businesses are much less “the customer is king” in their practices. Did you find this to be true?
The early schedule with the restaurants was pretty strange for the summer, given the area. We didn’t really encounter that elsewhere. To answer your question about Canadian businesses being “much less customer is king”, I don’t really know. My main contact was primarily restaurants and hotels and generally the service was fine. I think that issue is sometimes more noticeable in Europe. For all the controversy about tripping practices in North America I do think it results in denser staffing and more prompt and attentive servers.