Driving from Massachusetts to New Brunswick|Maritimes, Day 2

9/5/19 - Thursday
We were pleasantly surprised with our first experience with a Holiday Inn Express breakfast.

They had a pancake machine, so I had pancakes nearly every single morning. Francisco was pleased that they had eggs.

We had a big leap to make today in terms of driving from outside Boston, MA through New Hampshire and Maine and into New Brunswick, Canada.

We stopped to buy bottled water at Hannaford where we discovered that Maine had a large bottle deposit. Our $3.23 pack of water ended up costing $4.61.

We stopped at Gifford's Famous Ice Cream and got a Strawberry Oreo Storm Extreme Maine Mud.

We had our road trip snacks to munch on from our IHG stock-up the night before as we continued our drive through what struck Francisco as the very white state of Maine. 🤣

We crossed the border from Maine into New Brunswick, finally entering Canada. We noticed all of the moose fencing set-up along the highways to prevent collisions with the animals. Our first official Canadian tourist attraction was the Reversing Falls in Saint John. 

There were a lot of signs like this plastered all over the bridge. I just Googled it, and it looks like a woman lost her husband to suicide at the Reversing Falls Bridge, so she took it upon herself to post all these signs in hopes of helping others. 

The Bay of Fundy and the Saint John River collide here, creating a unique phenomenon. At low tide, the river empties into the bay causing a series of rapids and whirlpools. As tides rise, they slow the river current for a brief period called slack tide. The Bay's tides continue to rise, gradually reversing the flow of the river.

We went to Vegolution for dinner and shared an order of the Poutine and the Fake Steak. Our food was delicious. There was a bit of foreshadowing here as our waiter mentioned something about how it was a shame there was bad weather moving in. Francisco kind of brushed it off, saying he didn't know what he was talking about.  He had checked the weather, and there was one day with "some rain", but otherwise, things looked good.

We drove on to end the night in Moncton and got checked into our next Holiday Inn Express.

We were offered a welcome amenity of a single snack, and it was at this point that we really started to question our generous snack helping from the previous night. Live and learn, I guess.  From this point on, we just accepted the 500 bonus reward points in lieu of the snacks.

I don't like to spend a lot of time online while we're traveling, but I do at least scroll through my emails to make sure I don't miss anything important. The subject line "Alert: Weather - Hurricane Dorian" caught my attention. I had registered our trip with the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (something I try to remember to do for all of our travels), which ensures that you receive important information from the Embassy about safety conditions in your destination country.

"Hurricane Dorian is expected to severely impact parts of the Atlantic provinces this weekend.  Based on the latest forecast guidance, the most likely track projection brings Hurricane Dorian south of the Maritimes on Saturday, September 7, pushing through eastern Nova Scotia late in the day, and then over western Newfoundland by Sunday morning.

As with any hurricane or tropical storm, expect strong winds and power outages (some prolonged), heavy rains and storm surge with possible flooding, and difficult travel conditions on land, sea and air throughout Atlantic Canada. Severe winds and rainfall will have major impacts for southeastern New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Western Newfoundland, and the Quebec Lower North Shore."

Oh! So, that's what the guy at Vegolution was talking about! 

So, it turns out our vacation was directly in the path of a hurricane, and we were going to have some hard decisions to make to try and skirt around this huge weather obstacle. That was our conversation over the next day's breakfast...