Saint John - Here we are!

Dateline: Bay of Fundy to the North Atlantic in SMOOTH Seas!!
2340 Hours

This is our last night in Canadian waters as we head for Bar Harbor Maine and the good old U.S. of A. We have been at sea for one week and this is the smoothest night we have had since our first night out of Quebec Cite on the St. Lawrence (spelled correctly if you will note) River. Seas are calm and so are the winds. We have just returned from dinner with our new friends Tim and Cindy and a visit to “Snooker’s Bar,” Cuban cigars and drinks, where we watched as the Boston Red Sox whipping Colorado’s ass in Game One of the World Series. As usual, Carol and I got rowdy during the ballgame, but we have a lot of other Red Sox fans on-board egging us on (not that it takes a lot to get us fired up at a ball game). I have to smoke those Cigaros Cubanos as we have to go through customs tomorrow in Maine. Well, not all of them. I just will pull the rings off of them and tell them they are Macanudo’s… the liquor smuggling business is doing quite well, thank you, and our pals ask for daily updates on how we keep getting our booze on-board. Funny what will make you a short-time celebrity, eh?

We docked at 0800 Wednesday morning in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada. After catching up on our blog, email and VoIP phone calls to make sure the kids are okay (especially our eldest who lives in the L.A. area), we headed off for yet another Carol and Steve “self-guided tour” of the city. What an amazing place. Many of the “Loyalist” Brits migrated here from the Colonies at the end of the American Revolutionary War in the 1780’s, and began this city, which was completely annihilated by a terrible fire in 1877, and was completely re-built from the ground up. There are a few masonry churches that survived, but not much else. We have a photo of what is left of the city (see photos at our Google Photo Album).

From 1820 until the advent of iron ships at the turn of the 20th Century, St, John produced over 70% of the Western World’s ships, which made this a very wealthy city indeed. Please take some time to not only look at the beautiful Victorian homes we took photos of, but the technology employed to build these amazing wooden ships. Remember, all of this was done (until the 1850’s) with HAND saws, wooden pegs, hemp and tar (for caulking between the pieces of wood), and these ships endured the same (and worse) than the 985-foot Leviathan we cruise on tonight, with 16 engines that gobble 2731 TONS of fuel to produce 65,000 horsepower, driving our 109,000 TONS of mass through the ocean at a comfortable 22.5 knots!!!

We really enjoyed the museum here today, and they have a collection of marine life skeletons and fossils from the area that are just amazing. We also visited a science store for kids and came up with gift ideas for all of our grand children, which they really do enjoy getting from those weird grandparents that refuse to buy them iPods and such for Christmas and birthdays.

Vara - here is a special picture for you - a baby beluga! So now when you sing Baby Beluga you'll know that Grandma and Grandpa saw one!

Also remarkable about the Bay of Fundy are the tides here, which rise and fall almost 50 FEET every day!! It was really cool. Even with the size of the Grand Princess, when we left the ship this morning early, the gang plank walk was fairly steep. When we returned to the ship at Noon to put the laptop on our stateroom, the gangway was almost FLAT!! When we returned for the final sailing at about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday evening, the gangway was steep again. Note to self: No matter how big we build them, NO ONE screws with Mother Nature! She owns us all.
This is for you Dad, and all the other pilots in the audience. Look at the photos we took of the first variable pitch prop for airplanes, which was also invented in St. John in 1927. I was amazed to learn this (if you do not care about engineering or machines this will be a big HO HUM for you, so sorry about that)\, especially when you look at Turnbull’s rudimentary workshop. The tools Carol and I use to build furniture with today are machined so precisely, it is hard to imagine what these folks produced with such inaccurate tools.

For the shoppers in the crowd, Carol did you proud. We hit a Mall and the City Market, which is this sort of open affair under a roof that sells everything one could ask for. Of course this afforded us an opportunity to smuggle aboard a couple bottles of New Brunswick wine, which is now cooling in our stateroom fridge. Also, for those who are not that familiar with our travels, Carol and I have a Cardinal rule: One MUST purchase a cheesy fridge magnet from every city we visit, and the most important rule is that it cannot be “Fabrique in Chine.” We have pissed off the metal detectors coming on-board so much that the crew knows who we are and we just run the magnets through the scanner (good thing wine bottles are not magnetic or we would be screwed).

Well, that’s all until we find another port and the time to connect up with wireless Internet. We plan on biking through Acadia National Park all day in Bar Harbor, and hitting a lobster place recommended by our friend Anne Marie Gold.

Until then…..