Backfill Blogging Acadia

I mentioned in comments that I was trying out something I call "backfill blogging". I posted a photo a day while we were on vacation on the east coast of the province - near le coeur d'Acadie - with the intention of going back and filling in details of each location or activity. If you scroll down, you'll see that I've already filled in several of my earlier posts.

I've created a map to try to put the vacation into context; hope it does so.

One thing I wanted to share was the tradition of Acadians in this province of putting l'etoile d'Acadie - the star of Acadia - on their homes, to proudly proclaim their Acadian heritage. The Acadian flag features the colours of France with l'etoile added in the upper left-hand corner, and displaying a star on one's home has become a way of announcing the family's inclusion in that proud clan.

Here's a small collection of photos that demonstrate the variety of homes that show l'etoile.

You'll see these stars on homes throughout the province, which is neat; but they're particularly prevalent on the east and north borders of the province, where the Acadian culture is particularly strong.

The story of Acadians in New Brunswick is long and complicated. For too many years, they were second-class citizens in their own provinces - after they returned from their expulsion. That all began to change in New Brunswick with the passage of the Official Languages Act in 1969. Premier Louis Robichaud's legislation put French on an equal footing with English in NB and opened the gates to civil and public sector jobs wide open to francophones for the first time.

The result today of this and other social reform is a thriving Acadian culture and a thriving French language across the province, but nowhere so much as the north and east of the province, le coeur d'Acadie.

ronnie

Sightings in the Wild, part deux

Husband spotted a copy of Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? in local heroic independent bookstore Westminster Books in downtown Fredericton today. His cellphone takes small photos, but the book is unmistakeable!


I would like to sincerely apologize in advance for the lack of a critter of any description in the picture. I believe Westminster has at least one bookstore cat, but s/he was on his/her union-mandated break at the time of the photography.


ronnie

Saint-Louis-de-Kent

Petite Aldouane [UPDATED]

Petite Aldouane is a tiny village between Richibucto and Kougibougouac Park that we passed throug near-daily. The Petite Rivière Aldouane runs through it.

This is just a pretty picture of a pretty river in a pretty village on a very pretty day. Beauty like this was around us constantly. We take it for granted here, I was reminded.

ronnie

Richibucto [UPDATED]

Beach, beach, beach, yes, yes, but a girl's gotta eat, so on Wednesday we went down to the wharf in Richibucto, which I mentioned was home base, and got a couple of fresh lobster.

The photo at the top of the post is taken pre-carnage, in our hotel room. The small plates were for the potato salad (in the tub), not, as some commenters have speculated, designed to hold the lobster overspill. That was just Husband's creative plating.

They were big lobster - about 2.3 lbs each (old habits die hard, and you still buy your lobsters in pounds). That claw on the right is just about as big as it looks. And it was goooooood.

We were staying at the Silver Birch Motel in Richibucto, which is not where we were supposed to be staying. We'd booked a week at a lodge just outside the gates of Koughibougouac National Park. We arrived there on Sunday evening to discover that some things - a lot of the things - that were advertised on the website didn't, in fact, exist. (The restaurant? Only open for breakfast. The pleasant beer garden with the hanging plants? "Oh... that hasn't been open for a few years now..." The on-site internet? Non-existent.) As displeased with the fact that we'd been misled as by the lack of amenities, we asked for - and got - our money back. Now at loose ends, we scratched our heads, headed back south, and decided to stop at the first decent hotel, motel, chalet or lodge we spotted.

It turned out to be the Silver Birch. The sign said "Restaurant...Birch Lounge...Vacancies". The front desk clerk was pleasant. "Do you have wireless internet?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "Sign on the dotted line," I said to Husband.

The room - a ridiculously cheap $75 a night - was faded but clean, and big, and boasted a kitchenette and sofa as well as the bed. Definitely a step-up from most family-owned tourist motels in the area. The restaurant featured excellent home cooking (including a breakfast to die for), and since we happened to have hit town in time for the local Scallop Festival, served up enormous platters of huge, plump scallops with fries or mashed potatoes, veggies and coleslaw for less than $10 every evening.

The lounge - well, the lounge was an experience in and of itself. Bare-bones would be a compliment - Husband dubbed it The Spartan Lounge - veneer tables and stacking chairs, a handful of regulars playing video gambling machines, and a smaller handful of regulars sitting at the bar chatting loudly in French with the garrulous bartenders. We were made to feel more than welcome.

The jarring exception to the painfully generic motel bar decor was a series of space-themed murals that had been painted, inexplicably, on every door in the place. Just the doors. And our favourite mural was the jaw-dropping Space-Alien Stripper (as we dubbed her) painted on a door behind the bar that led into the kitchen. She's wearing some kind of totally-ineffectual space helmet that isn't sealed. Those tassels are real, folks, and swung back and forth every time someone passed through the portal.

All in all, the Silver Birch proved a perfectly adequate home base from which to go north, or south, as we chose on any given day, and explore the area. Every staff member was inordinately kind to us, and I hope they prosper for years to come.

Weird space murals and all.

ronnie

Kouchibouguac [UPDATED]

On Wednesday the weather had turned hot and sunny and we headed to the raison d'être for this vacation, Kougibougouac National Park and the beach!

This is Kelly's Beach, one of several in the park. This beach itself is located on a wide dune, and you access the beach by traversing 1.2km of boardwalk similar to that at the Eco-Centre (previous post). In addition to the dunes' inherent fragility, its far ends to the north and south are nesting grounds part of the year for the piping plover. The plovers' eggs and chicks are at great risk from a wide variety of predators (foxes, crows, dogs, cats), along with human accidental destruction, so during nesting time the nesting areas are strictly off-limits, both the dune and the beach.




They're serious about this - a security guard polices the boundary all day, sitting in a small sunshade at the beginning of the nesting area.

Sometimes the nests are encircled with wire fencing so that the birds can get in and out, but predators can't get to the eggs or chicks. The park rangers also rely on night-vision video cameras to keep an eye on the nests.

I spoke to one park ranger who told me that it had been a very good year so far - they'd recorded eight live chicks. (I read in the park literature that only 1 in 4 survive to flight age.)

Good luck, little guys!

Given the weather (the temperatures went from 23° to 29° over the next 3 days and it was cloudless and sunny), the number of tourists crawling over every part of the region, and the fact that the local kids are out of school, the beach - the nicest in the immediate area - was astonishingly roomy the three days we spent significant hours baking on it. lots of families, though - lots and lots of kids. Made for some interesting watching, but a much louder beach experience than we're used to in Cuba!

For the next few days we continued to explore the region (I will be posting a map in the near future) but made sure to clock lots of beach time at "Kougch".

ronnie

Bouctouche [UPDATED]

On Tuesday the weather was even better so we visited a spot we had both been looking forward to - the Irving Eco-Centre on the Bouctouche dune.

The Bouctouche dune is "one of the few remaining great sand dunes on the northeastern coastline of North America". It stretches for 12km parallel to the east coast of New Brunswick.



The dune is a fragile habitat where migratory shorebirds nest and native grasses try - with varying success - to anchor the dune from the ravages of wind, water and erosion. The dune is also getting narrower due to rising water levels, a side-effect of climate change.

The Irving family/industrial conglomerate, whose roots are in Kent County (and whose presence is overwhelming in New Brunswick), has created an impressive infrastructure on the dune. An interpretive centre, lookout tower, and slate of educational programs help locals and tourists alike understand the ecological importance of the dune and the surrounding habitat. 2km of meandering boardwalk allow visitors to walk the dune and see the flora and fauna (well, birds, mostly, and crabs and other shellfish) that populate it.



To the right of the boardwalk as it appears in the photo above is a saltwater marsh, fed by the tides that slip over and around the dune; we saw graceful herons feeding there. (Too far away to photograph without a zoom, sadly.)

(<= saltwater marsh) There's no admission fee to experience this beautiful natural treasure; I'm not sure how the financing works (the lack of an admission fee made me wonder mightily), but as far as I can tell the Irvings built the thing "as a gift to Kent County" and donations and gift-shop sales certainly contribute.

The Eco-Centre was a great experience, but just driving through this part of the province is a treat all by itself. Take, for example, this roadside shrine to the Virgin we saw not far from the park entrance. You'll spot these here and there around here - a reminder of the very French, very Catholic history and culture of this place.

Weather was definitely improving. Wednesday would be sunny and 23°; time to explore Kougibigouac National Park and hit the beach!

ronnie