Dieppe, N.B.

Total Km = 466

More excellent riding weather. Temperatures in the mid to high 20s. Spent most of today moose hunting in the wilds of Maine and N.B. No luck with a sighting but we are hot on their tracks (see picture). We found this at one of the roadside stops.

The country we saw today was dominated by coniferous forest, in contrast to the deciduous landscape we have been in the past few days. Lots of great spruce wetland moose habitat. Learned an interesting fact in one of the tour books. Moose are often seen in the wet lands as they are finding aquatic plants rich in sodium to replenish the sodium stores they have lost over the winter – not to keep cool and away from the bugs as previously thought.

The small towns were typical New England with the “saltbox” housing design very prevalent (see pic). The very friendly borederguard (yes, he looked bored) at the small crossing of Calais, N.B. has the driving times to anywhere in the area memorized and recited several to us just in case we were interested or in need. Our initial impression of Maritime roads was as we had remembered from our previous trip – very poor/rough pavement but this did get better as we went along.

We spent the last couple of hours on the freeway past Fredericton into Moncton (Dieppe, where we are staying is a suburb of Moncton). The freeway was virtually deserted. The major intersection where two lanes peel to the left for the province’s capital and two lanes peel to the right for Moncton was like a scene out of the Twilight Zone: not another vehicle to be seen anywhere. We have decided it is better to enter urban areas on the freeways as the secondary routes often dissolve into back streets in the cities (we found this in Pt. Erie/Buffalo) and at least on the freeways there are billboards giving directions to most of the things we are looking for.

Raindancer has now been dropped off for servicing and we have a non-riding day tomorrow. Norma has spied a seafood restaurant nearby, so that will be on the agenda. We need to do the lobster comparison while the Maine Lobster is fresh in our memory – taste memory that is! Then again, we may need to try some other seafood fare.