July 31 - St. Alexandre de Kamouraska QC

The point on the map to see today was the Hartland covered bridge which is the longest covered bridge in the world at 1,282 feet.  We were going to go through it but we didn’t know for sure if the bridge was tall enough for us (especially when there was no indication of the height) so we stopped literally feet from the entrance.  Probably a very wise move.

We then travelled on to Florenceville-Bristol, the French Fry Capital of the World.  It is called this because one in every three French fry eaten in the world today is produced by McCain Foods, a company that started in Florenceville.  We found out this interesting little fact when we went through Potato World.  This museum was exceptionally well kept and informative – we enjoyed going through it.

As we were driving along we saw a sign advertising ziplining a gorge so we had to stop and try to find that.  We saw the waterfalls in Grand Falls and some of the gorge where they do the training for the real thing but when we tried to get to the gorge itself we were told there were 250 steps down so that immediately put the kibosh on that.  It would have been great to get some photos of the training and there were people there as we were driving up but by the time we got there they had all gone away – rats!

All the signs in New Brunswick are bilingual (French and English) and we noticed that the further west and north we went in the province the move prevalent French became in signage and in speech.  As soon as we crossed the border into Quebec, however, the bilingual signage disappeared and everything is in French.  I don’t know what it is about us but we are immediately identified as non-French.  We’ll have to do some serious brushing up on our French! 

 It was a real thrill to drive along the St. Lawrence Seaway and we should be beside it all the way to Quebec City tomorrow!

When we stopped at the Visitor's Center in Quebec we realized we had forgotten to change our time back an hour days ago and now we needed to go back an additional hour - good thing time doesn't really matter much to us right now.