Crossing the border

Saturday July 23 2016. The fantasy RV Tours group left the United states this morning. We heard Phil and Karen, the Wagon Masters leave at 7 am, the rest of the group departed at their leisure throughout the morning. We left at around 9:30 and by then there were only a few of the tour coaches left at the Bar Harbor Maine campground. The tail gunner would depart last after all the paying customers.

Bar Harbor Maine to St Andrews New Brunswick Canada

I had created routes for my GPS as soon as I had received the itinerary package from the tour company. The Wagon Master has given us extremely detailed turn by turn directions with instructions not to deviate from the assigned route. As you can guess it did not take long for these two methods to come into conflict.

After only a few miles of travel I found myself sitting at a fork in the road, To the left the tour company route was bumper to bumper traffic and under construction. To the right, my route, the one the wagon master had specifically told us not to take, lay empty before me like Robert Frost's road less traveled. “Two roads diverged in the wood and I took the one less travel and that made all the difference.”

The road less traveled

We felt liberated breaking the rules and going off on our little adventure. Our short cut across the mountains was a wonderful ride with scenic vista's appearing over every rise in the road. To be fair to the Wagon Masters, the road did pass through some fairly desolate country and there were no shoulders on the two lane country road. Millie and I loved it, we have traveled all over the USA alone and are very confident of our abilities. In fact when we traveled with Clay and Rebecca a few days ago that was the first time we have ever rode in a group.

After traveling about 100 miles we reached the border. As we passed the southbound US customs entrance we could see that, like the Mexico/US border crossings, they rely heavily on electronics. Southbound vehicles must drive through a gauntlet of sensors and camera's before reaching the border agent booth. Canadian's have no visible surveillance, just a cordial customs agent who asks about ½ dozen questions. The quiz itself is really irrelevant, the agent is trained to read the body language of the vehicles occupants. Which system works better, I don't know, but the Israelis are really good at this and they use body language method.

Border crossing

Our GPS automatically switched over to the metric system when we crossed the border, that was pretty cool and made speed monitoring easier. In no time at all we arrived at Kiwanis Campground which sits on the water in the village of St Andrews. It is on Passamaquaddy Bay in New Brunswick Canada.

Kiwanis campground

There was an optional tour of Ministers Island in the afternoon, the unique aspect of the tour is you must wait for low tide and then drive across the bay bottom to the island. We elected to pass up on the activity and take a nap instead. Later in the afternoon I spoke with one of the others in our group who did the tour and he affirmed my guess that driving on the bedrock was the highlight of the outing.

In the evening we walked the promenade around the point of land the campground sits on. We found a small park with a monument to Irish immigrants who died of hunger and disease while fleeing the potato famine. They are buried on nearby Hospital island, the monument was commissioned by their descendants who persevered and went on to prosper in Canada.

Passamaquaddy Bay

On our way back to the motorhome we heard music coming from the activity center in the campground. It was a jam session of local musicians. We always enjoy this type of home spun entertainment, for a little while, it takes you back to a simpler time.

Jammers at Kiwanis campground