2023 Summer Road Trip – Day 44 – Saint John Reversing Rapids

Thursday, August 17, 2023

There was a beautiful sunrise in Nackawic this morning.  There were also lots of Canada geese in our parking lot when we stepped out.  Surprisingly, they did not wake us up this morning.  After our walk and breakfast, we headed south.  We stopped to get gas and paid for it with the last of our Canadian cash, plus a little on the credit card.  Yes, we are trying to do some last few things on our list and eat some last few goodies out of the refrigerator in preparation for crossing the border back into the USA in the next few days.  We are a little sad, but we still have some adventures planned as we head south.  Things we didn’t take time to do on the way up.

Today we drove to Saint John, New Brunswick, home of the reversing rapids.  This was another one of the things on the NB list that we skipped on the way up.  In Saint John, you can watch the big Saint John River reverse course and water move back up over the rapids.  It’s all because of the tidal change in the Bay of Fundy.  The Saint John empties into the Bay of Fundy like you expect rivers to do.  But when the Bay is on rising tide the force of the water rushing into the bay forces water back up the river and over the rapids.  At slack to low tide the river runs rapidly out with the water going over the rapids flowing out to the sea.  We saw this happening to small creeks/rivers in other places close to the Fundy but the Saint John is a big river and yet it is still overpowered by the Fundy twice every day.

We decided to move on to Saint Stephens for the night.  It is about an hour southwest of Saint John.  Surprise, surprise.  We are connecting to a Verizon tower in Maine.  Our phone is back on Eastern even though we are still on Atlantic time.  I suspect the phone will role back to Atlantic Time tomorrow.  It’s been another wonderful day.