Day 31 – Thursday, June 12, 2014

Gran Pre, Nova Scotia to Amherst, Nova Scotia – 167 miles

We started the day with a visit to the Museum of Acadian Culture, located just down the road from our campsite.  As mentioned yesterday, this was the center of Acadia, which is what the Maritime Provinces were known as before the mid-1700s.  The site of the museum is at the location of the original village of Grand Pre, on a broad tidal flat that was reclaimed by the French settlers by building a series of dikes, much like those in Holland.  I won’t go into the details of the sad history of the Acadians, but briefly, this thriving culture was uprooted by the British during the French and Indian War of the1750s, with the people being forcefully removed and relocated to various locations in the American colonies and back to France.  Eventually, many of these people made their way back to Acadia after many years, and a large number of them ended up in the Mississippi delta region where they’re known today as Cajuns (a contraction of the word Acadian).

Robert Louis Stephenson wrote a story about an Acadian woman named Evangeline who was separated from her husband during this period and never reunited, and the statue of her on the grounds of the history center is a famous landmark.

After leaving the history center, we returned to the river at Port William to observe the high tide coming in.  We arrived about two hours before the peak, and stationed ourselves at a viewpoint on the east side of the river, right by the highway bridge and across from the old wooden wharf structure I mentioned yesterday.  The tide was scheduled to max out at 42 feet plus today, and when we got to our viewpoint the river was flowing rapidly upstream – a very interesting phenomenon.  We noted several landmarks to gauge the progress of the tide – watermarks on the piers supporting the highway bridge, cross-beams on the wharf pilings and other structures on the far side of the river, plus a small gully leading down to the river on our side.  As we watched, the tide-driven river rose probably 10 feet in the two hours we were there, covering first one of our landmarks then another.  As it approached the actual high mark, the upstream flow slowed noticeably and the turbulence around the bridge piers ceased, until finally the only movement on the river were the wind driven ripples blowing across the water’s surface.  We would have liked to stay to watch the tide begin flowing outward, but it was now one o’clock and we had to get moving.

We made it as far as Amherst, Nova Scotia this evening, and are now camped in a very nice campground situated on a small lake.  Amherst is right on the border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, so tomorrow we’ll cross back over into the latter, and will probably be back in the US by Saturday, or Sunday at the latest.  And speaking of late, it’s now 10:00pm and I haven’t downloaded the last two day’s photos, so that will have to wait.