2024 Bigger Truck across Canada day 4

Day 4 dawned with a bit of anxiety and a whole lot of hope. We needed to get to St-CYR RV which opened at 9am, hopefully find a towbar in stock that would work, then find whatever hardware we needed to cobble together the attachment to the Jeep bumper. A tall task, made a bit more difficult with the whole French language thing.

When we arrived, we came in with the bumper adapter that we use, and as soon as the first word came out of my mouth, the guy at the parts counter put his hands up and called to a sweet old lady, who turned out to be incredibly helpful. Her broken English was so much better than our very broken French. Between the 3 of us, we arrived at what they had in stock, which turned out to be almost exactly what we needed. Of course the bumper adapters wouldn't work without some custom redneck engineering, but luckily there was a Home Depot 10 km away.

We headed over to the French Home Depot, went foraging for the hardware aisle, and were immediately greeted with this.

I have to say, seeing the aisle title I was a bit disappointed to find out that it wasn't filled with Fast & Furious, Tenacious D, and RAD merchandise (and perhaps some Nicolas Cage stickers). Instead, we would settle for a couple of old men who did their best to help me MacGruber a pile of washers, bolts, hitch pins, and disregard for instructions into this masterpiece that we will never speak of again once we are back in the US of A. Kimberly deserves a ton of credit for helping me piece this together in my heightened state of anxiety to get on the road.

After some tense moments on the highway, anxiety gave way to anticipation, and we were back in the standard mode of transportion.

Now our attention turned toward the 8 hours of driving in front of us, with the end destination of Alma, New Brunswick. Along the way, we saw some distinctly Canadian sights.

Traffic became more and more scarce, and eventually we felt like the only vehicle on the road. The winding 2 lane road with a single yellow line started to feel a bit like the old motorcyle trips out west, and just as I was thinking that, Kimberly said "Hey, I know I'm usually pretty comfortable with your driving, but I feel like you might kill us." I assured her I was driving under the speed limit, and she assured me that she was not interested in the speed limit given the size of our rig. Here is the road we were on during said exchange.

The other thing we discovered during this drive, as a testament to our American ignorance, was the existence of the Atlantic Standard Time Zone. While we were driving, our ETA jumped by an hour, and all of us were quite intrigued to realize that this tiny pocket of Canada has a time zone 1 hr ahead of the Eastern Time Zone. Jordan and Kimberly instantly commiserated about how this would not help their eternal desire to sleep in.

As we approached our campground, we passed through Fundy National Park, and also saw a black bear just chilling on the side of the road. We did reach one scenic turnout before exiting the National Park, and finally jumped out to see the bay at low tide and get a sneak preview of our next few days.

When we finally arrived at the campground, the first time unhooking the Jeep with the new setup was a breeze. We rolled into site 6 at West River Campground, and were pleasantly surprised. It was definitely meant to be, as our site had a raised planter bed of vegetables just like the one Jordan has been tending back home. No surprise, but she was immediately out there watering and weeding.

By the way, that lobster boat you see in the background, Jacob Boy, is apparently available as an AirBNB. Jordan, after about 20 minutes here, spoke a near blasphemous statement - "This is my new favorite campground, it's now number 1 over Pentwater". Bold statement. All in all, given the circumstances, today turned out as well as it could have. We now have the next few days to explore the largest tidal range in the world. Cheers!