If it’s Tuesday it must be Saint John

What a difference a day and country makes.  Yesterday we were in Bar Harbor Maine USA.  Today we are in Saint John New Brunswick Canada.  Yesterday we had potato chips. Today we have Dulse!

  Oh yes you eat it like potato chips! Only if you are starving to death and they are out of fried mush. 

Now think back two days ago I was munching on some great gelato and today we were eating this purple stuff.  This is one of those free samples you get and you immediately look for a place to remove it from your mouth! Good news, as the sign says they ship anywhere!

Saint John is the home of the Bay of Fundy and the Saint John River. Below is where the river meets the bay.

The bay has the largest tidal change in the world.  From low tide to high tide the depth of the river in some spots changes as much as 52 feet.  When the tide comes in the river flows backwards up to 85 miles up river.  Right in Saint John itself the tide changes 28 feet and causes unbelievably large rapids in the river.  So what are rapids good for?  You guessed it --- riding through them on a jet boat!

Of course Cindy and I had to do this. We dressed in full foul weather gear and boarded our boat with ten other victims, I mean adventurers.

 

You would think with all this foul weather gear you wouldn’t get wet.

I hope you can see how soaked my pants are.  Lucky for us, we read in the tour description that they suggested to bring dry clothes and a towel with you.  Some of our fellow adventurers must have missed that and had to sit on the bus dripping wet for our ride back to the ship.  This is one of those crazy things you should do at least once in your life.  We had such a great time the first run through the rapids that we talked our pilot in to taking us through a second time!

Since the tide drops so much so fast our captain said we had to be back on board by 3:30 PM so he could get out of the harbor by 4 PM before low tide.  He said if we missed that tide we would have to wait till after 7 PM  to get out of the harbor and be late the next day for our next port of call.  Well we made it with a musical send off and the captain said we only had 2.5 meters (9 feet)  of water under our ship when we left.

Cindy and I were sitting in the internet cafe on the ship looking out the window and you could watch the ship drop from the tide change.  It reminded us how it looked when we were going through the locks of the Panama Canal.