CL Canada: Day Four - Things that end in "-og"

Fog

Bog

Dog

Fog...Fog...

That pretty much describes today.

We got up this morning to find visibility was at an all time low. We had considered spending another morning, or perhaps even another full day, on Mount Desert Island and do either some harbor tours, kayaking, hiking Acadia, or some combination there of, so we spent the morning walking around the campground, getting ready, tidying up the camper, and waiting to see what the weather was going to do. Consulting the weather and some locals, we decided that it just wasn't going to cooperate and since we had already decided we must come back and spend a couple days doing Acadia sometime in the not too distant future, we hit the road with Canada in our sights.

Leaving MDI we plotted a course along some backroads up to Highway 9, which leads straight to Calais, and more importantly, Canada. There's not much on 9 between Bangor and Calais.... so we rolled into Calais, topped off the tank with low-tax American fuel and got in the line for the border crossing. I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but this wasn't quite it, a lot less signage and organization than I thought, I suppose. Either way, they could have seemed to care less about JD, didn't even ask for his shot records, which was the greatest stress Lindy had leading up to the border crossing. They were however, quite concerned as to the type and quantity of the Blueberry wine that we picked up in Maine... go figure.

Once we were across and into St. Stephens, we hit Gonong's Chocolate, which is supposedly the company responsible for the introduction of those heart shaped boxes of chocolate that we're forced to buy every February 14th into North America. I guess I can't complain though, because their museum tour included trays of fine chocolates scattered about, with no limit on how many you could consume. I really don't recall that much else about the tour, because I was in a sugar coma for 80% of it...

BTW - They don't import these into the USA, but I did get their mail-order information.

After a quick stop at the New Brunswick tourism office we hit highway 1, and after a short while pulled into St. George. There's not much there, but I did manage to stumble across this dam, which had a fairly elaborate fishway to allow migrating fish to continue upstream to spawn. I'm a nerd, so I thought it was cool...

Our stop for the night was a campground at a provincial park at New River Beach. Provincial parks seem to be roughly the equivalent of our state parks, but nicer. We grabbed a site near the bath-house and setup camp, since we planned to walk across the street and hit the hiking trails before the mist set in too thick. After walking across the street, we found that there was no access to the trails there, but a mile and a half walk down the road later we were in business. Lindy had a good time, and I must admit the views and the foliage weren't terrible, but after I ran out of coordination on one of the slippery wooden boardwalks that traversed some of the wetter parts of the trail while being pulled by the dog and hit the deck, I was a bit out of sorts... (I'm guessing this was JDs payback for us making him ride the scary bus to Bar Harbor, after which he placed the blame squarely on me for some reason).