Moncton NB and our 1st Anniversary – Day 16

Today started with my favourite activity when I used to spend a lot of time living in hotels: We woke up just in time for the end of the fancy “free breakfast buffet,” ate breakfast, went back to the room and straight back to bed! (Especially useful skill when you’ve just moved into yet another new time zone… Atlantic time now – just a half-hour left to go when we get to NFLD!

Once we got up for real, we started enjoying our first anniversary in New Brunswick. In a hypothetical way, I had been aware of the fact that New Brunswick is the only province that is actively bilingual, but I hadn’t really known what that meant before today. We really heard about 50/50 French and English being spoken, and I was reminded of my time working at Chez Michel’s, spending a great deal of time listening to people asking me questions in French and answering them in English. I imagine that in Quebec, I’ll have to try to answer in French too, but in NB, they don’t mind.

We walked through downtown (where we suspect that at some point – about mid-19^th century – there was a major church construction-off. The French Catholics won.) and under the “subway” (a bridge that is just slightly too low for the average semitrailer to go under it. From the look of the bridge, many of the semis don’t realize that until too late).

After that, we went through a much more unfashionable area of Moncton (but still not too bad) and arrived at Jones Lake – a manmade lake that puts every other manmade lake I’ve ever seen to shame.



 Adam was a bit off-put by the local geese that had dibs on the path by the lake, but once I discovered that it was really just an issue of the geese wanting to make sure we’d taken sufficient pictures of them, it was ok. I suspect that they have a bit of a turf war going on with the local (very friendly) ducks.

We stopped for a light lunch at a cool pub on the way back to the hotel, and tried to go into a restored Vaudeville Theatre, but they had a drama camp going on – we picked up a pamphlet on the theatre though.

Then I left Adam at the hotel to put the finishing touches on my anniversary present, and I went to the local mall, with plans to meet back at the Tidal Bore Park. All went according to plan, and we met up just in time to see the tide come in and make the river rise hugely and flow backwards. It was a crazy “man, that nature can sure do some weird stuff” time.

We went back to the hotel and drank our anniversary champagne and opened our presents. I got Adam a notepad with some photos from our wedding, and a bunch more wedding photos made into fridge magnets (and he wondered why I knew a great website to make photo fridge magnets when he wanted to make some last week!)  I was glad that he was still happy with that when he gave me a handmade music box that plays the theme he wrote for me to walk down the aisle at the wedding. I, personally, think he totally won this gift exchange.

Then we went for dinner at the Keg, which is the restaurant attached to this hotel. Being New Brunswick, this Keg gets daily fresh lobster, so I got a surf and turf feature, and Adam had a Bacon wrapped filet. Our server, Stewart, was charming in 2 languages, and dinner was amazing, after which we went back to the hotel, watched a movie, and I wrote all this.

Tomorrow, we point the car towards Halifax, and then the next day we fly to Newfoundland – this really is an amazing adventure!