St.John NB & Maine

Where was Stephen King’s fictitious town – Derry supposed to be? To read about our latest travels our Blog update.

The answer to the question is Bangor Maine, the home of Stephen King, Gail’s favourite author. It is a rainy Saturday morning as we wait for hurricane Kyle to pass. I chose a campground on a hill so flooding shouldn’t be a problem. We left Halifax Sept 22 and made our way to Rockwood Campground in Saint John NB. The weather for that week was spectacular with sun,sun, & and more sun. Rockwood campground is part of a 2200 acre park in the city that is mostly inhabited by tradesmen working on new mega projects. You can not make a reservation and with limited sewer sites all that is available is power and water. The have a pump truck that will empty your tanks for $20. I had a long discussion with the campground director and sent a e-mail to the mayor ( No reply yet) about the lack of sewer sites. With tourism being down 50% they made a decision to fill the campground with permanent trades people to keep the revenue up. It is too bad because it is a spectacular RV park right in the middle of Rockwood Park. The city bus comes right into the campground twice a day and will take you on a city tour for $18. While there are many other campgrounds in the surrounding areas this is the only one in the central city. We had a good time because the weather was so great. Now they should rename St.John to IRVING. Most of us from the west have no idea how big Irving Oil is with diversity in refining,trucking,petrochemical plants, Nuclear Power, Pulp & Paper etc. While the down town harbour is pretty with a lot of old buildings the view from our campground on the hill tells a different story.

St.John is a massive Irving refining plant that stretches for miles. They are currently building a second refinery and a Nuclear Power Plant. All of this energy is exported to the USA and NONE is sold in Canada. I feel sad for St.John as I think it has lost its beauty with pollution.

We left Bangor Maine and crossed over to the US at Calais. The boarder police were really nice and didn’t put me in jail for the lemons and limes Gail forgot to throw out. They didn’t even ask about booze or meat. It was a gorgeous sunny fall day and colors had just started to turn as we took the south route- Highway 1 to Bangor. Originally I had planned on staying at Bar Harbour but Hurricane Kyle changed my mind. Thought we would find some high ground to be safe. We are in a nice campground called Pleasant Hill. It is just on the outskirts of Bangor but there were lots of choices. Yesterday we toured Bar Harbour , which is part of Acadia National Park and found it spectacular but crowded with lots of traffic. This is in the off season with all the huge hotels empty. I have no idea what happens in the summer. There is a KOA campground in Bar Harbour that has waterfront sites for $78/night. Not sure what we are going to do yet. The weather for the next week is not great even after the storm passes. This afternoon Doug & Louise Perry are arriving in their Motorhome. They parked next to us in Halifax and are from Cranbrook so we had two BC plates side by side. We are having them over for dinner tonight and will talk Canadian !!!!! Some facts- Diesel is $3.86/gallon, 2 liters skim milk $1.81, 5-liters of Mountain Chablis in a box- $14.99, two salmon filets wrapped in crab meat $3.99 each.

Keep the Emails coming and will work on uploading some more pictures.