March 25 – Saint John, New Brunswick
Mar 28th, 2018 by rallyadmin
We’re up and gone by 8:00’ish. But it’s cold and there are snow flurries. Fortunately, we only get a small amount of accumulation in mounts northeast of Scranton. By the time get back to lower altitudes there snow flurries become intermittent and the road is clear.
Up I-84 through New York, Connecticut to the Mass Pike in Massachusetts. It’s a Sunday and there’s not much traffic. Leave the Mass Pike at Worcester and join I-290 to I-495 eventually meeting I-95 north of Boston.
We’re meeting Marc and Mark in Saint John, NB so we follow I-95 almost up to the Canadian border before getting off and heading southeast to cross at St. Stephen, NB. Saint John is another 70 miles past St. Stephen.
We get to St. Stephen by 5 PM and check into customs and, for the 5th crossing in a row, I get the passports back with a yellow form and we are politely asked to park the truck and come in for a chat. Been here, done this.
Park the truck. Go inside. Hand the form to the customs officer inside. Have a nice little chat about where we’re from. Where we’re going. Why are we going there. Final decision seems to be that we are, in fact, lunatics but probably harmless lunatics. “Mostly harmless” as they say in the Encyclopedia Gallactica. If you don’t know, look it up.
Of course, the only way to to decide if we really are “mostly harmless”, is to search the truck. About 20 minutes later we get called out to the truck to unload the bins in the bed of the truck. Hand down all of the bins. The officers opens each one. We close it up again. “Okay, you can put them back in the truck.” “By the way, possession and/or use of radar detectors in now a $500 fine and confiscation of the detector. “I didn’t but I could have fined you $500 and kept the detector. Put it in one of the bins and don’t bring it back to Canada.” Okey, dokey.
By the time we leave, the sun is setting (the weather had cleared somewhere in Maine.) It’s been a wonderful, beautiful day. But its ending and we still have 70 miles to go to Saint John. Getty has found a nice hotel and a restaurant that has a kitchen that’s open til 10PM.
Check in. Off to the restaurant for “the world’s best fish and chips” and some good single malt scotch. Back to the hotel by about 11:30 and into bed. Tomorrow should be an easy day. We built in a slack day to sight-see and cover any delays getting to the Newfoundland Ferry.
The band is back together.
Obi-wan