I am writing on an Acadian Coach as we ride between Riviere-du-Loup, on the St. Laurence east of Quebec City, and Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick.
We departed the Montreal Gare de Autocars at 06:00 on an Orléans Coach. A slight hint of dawning light was in the eastern sky as we pulled onto the freeway. We paralleled the St. Laurence, crossed over at Quebec, and changed buses in St. Foy (Quebec). At Riviere-du-Loup, we changed from the Orléans to this vehicle. We are now 20-some kilometers from the New Brunswick border where, I assume, everything will magically turn into English.
We have had numerous stops and slow-downs, detours, and bewildered bus driver moments as a hearty program of road repair and construction rushes to completion before the snow falls.
This country is beautiful. The flat lands around Montreal have given way to rolling hills, some high enough to be crowned with a ski area. Fall is just beginning to tint leaf tips with a deep red. Villages, each with at least one very tall church spire, nestle in green valleys. When we pull in to deliver someone, the houses are simple, modest and well-kept.
All the sitting of our travels has inflamed a nerve from my right buttock, down my leg to my knee and sometimes beyond. My chiropractor told me the name and how to stretch to ease it. I stretch, but I have forgotten the name. It may be resistant because I cannot properly address it.
At the hostel:
We pulled into Fredericton a few minutes late and called a taxi for the ride to Rosary Hall, now a Canadian Youth Hostel. According to the manager, about eighty people stay in the connected house and three story brick hall which once housed a Catholic women’s order. A large number of foreign students live at the hall while attending UNB, St. Thomas, or one of the smaller trade schools.
Our room consists of a twin bed and a bunk bed set, a sink, and a wardrobe. The room is very warm and humid, although the rest of the hall doesn’t seem to be. We are close to the exit door, the kitchen, and two washrooms.
The Fredericton capital volkswalk was a large loop utilizing trails along the St. John River. We registered at the Crowne Plaza Lord Beaverbrook Hotel, probably the spiffiest hotel in town and right next to the provincial art museum. Behind the hotel, we entered the trail which took us along the river to a former railroad bridge converted to a pedestrian crossing. We paused with some others about 3/4ths of the way over to watch two shore fishermen land what looked like a 12 pound salmon.
Following the trail north along the river, we stopped for a Tim Horton coffee before crossing back over the river, walking across the bridge on a protected pedestrian path next to busy vehicle lanes. At its west end, the traffic ramps went to the right, left, and straight ahead. To get to the ‘straight ahead,’ a walkway crossed under the bridge and connected with another safe walkway.
Fredericton did another piece of walking infrastructure engineering by building a steel elevated walkway over a busy road, utilizing the end piling of a previous automobile bridge.
We were equally impressed by the Saturday farmers’ market. Housed in and around a market building about five blocks from our hostel, the Fredericton Market is considered among the top ten Canadian markets which puts it into a level with Granville Market in Vancouver and our recently visited Marché Jean-Talon in Montreal.
Nothing was left out. A variety of crafts, meats (fresh and processed), dairy (milk, cheese, and an excellent yogurt), breads and pastas, vegetables and fruit, all local or nearby regional were available. A delicious array of prepared foods were offered both inside and outside the market building.
One of the things making the market more than a market was the variety of languages I heard spoken. A French speaking man had a case of patés and sausages. A German bakery did what German bakeries do. Eastern European and Slavic languages existed side-by-side with the Queen’s English, Asian, and southeast Asian. All this happening in a settlement of 56,000, only slightly larger than our combined towns of Kelso and Longview.
Fredericton supplied the first of our remaining seven Canadian provincial capitals. Time to move on to Prince Edward Island and its capital, Charlottetown.
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