The Acadian Penninsula

We were up until 11:30 last night, but compensated by sleeping unitl almost 8:30 this morning. That resulted in a bit of a late start to our day. But we made up a lot of time when we found that our first planned stop for the day was not yet open for the season. The tour book said that the Acadian Historical Village was open June to September. Unfortunately, June means June 7 in this case. I knew we were a little early and would beat the tourist rush, but it didn't occur to me that some of these places would not yet be open. To me, June is already summer. But, having experienced the weather so far, summer is still coming.

We had an interesting experience anyway. We drove into the parking lot and there were quite a few cars there. But there didn't seem to be anyone looking after admissions. We tried the security and information kiosk, but there was no one there. There was a small sign that said something about personnel, which I took to be something like authorized personnel only, but I don't undersatnd French, so we drove on through. We had a nice little tour of some new costruction they were doing and some maintenance construction until a very nice gentleman tracked us down and explained that they weren't open and he would escort us to the exit. It looks like a pretty good "attraction," so we might try to hit it on the way back.

From there we went on to the NB Aquarium and Marine Centre.

















There, I drove a fishing boat,













while Celeste hung on to the back of the boat. They had a small museum and a very nice, but not large aquarium of local ocean and freshwater fish.







From there we went on to Miramichi to a small historic site dealing with the deportation of the Acadians and the subsequent establishment of a shipbuilding enterprise. We checked into our hotel about 5 and got a recommendation on where to go for a lobster dinner, which we thoroughly enjoyed. We then took a bit of a driving tour around Chatham and Miramichi before waddling back to the hotel for the evening.

Weather was much like yesterday, temperature around 20, sunny, but windy enough that you were cool without a jacket.

The whole northeast coast of NB is called the Acadian Coast and the area we covered today is called the Acadian Penninsula. It was sure evident in our experiences today as French seemed to be the first language of most of the people we encountered, although they easily switched to English for us.

In the more remote areas, the road is lined with forest, but, for most of the day, there were lines of houses on both sides of the road, almost like a continuous ribbon of village, stretched out for miles and miles.