I began the day by going backwards. My original plan had been to visit Le Pays de la Sagouine, but looking at the website, it seemed to be mostly an experience of actors being folksy jolly at you, probably with insults at and complaints about “les Anglais” thrown in for good measure. A local told me it is very popular with Québécois tourists. So instead, I went North along the coast to the J.D. Irving Eco-Park, where I walked along the boardwalk to the end, then looked at the dune which goes on for a dozen kilometres or so. It was easy to believe that two families of foxes call the sand spit home.
Heading back to Bouctouche, I stopped at the Musée de Kent. This proved to be a former Catholic girls school and convent and was a surprisingly interesting stop. The chapel was a magnificent wooden exercise in neogothic architecture. After coming down from the former dormitory for the students who boarded, I jokingly said to the guide that the nuns had clearly taught their pupils to be tough and capable young women, based on the chainsaw upstairs! In fact, the chainsaw was part of the “clutter of artefacts” portion of the museum. ;-) This led to a discussion of the education of women to be capable in the Catholic Church as expressed by Mummy in her translation of the name of my primary school, “Notre Dame de Tout Pouvoir” as “Our Lady who can do anything”! I.e. a Virgin Mary who faced with a task, would roll up her sleeves, call in Joseph and handy offspring and get down to it.
Heading along the coast towards Shediac, I was surprised by the following sight:
It was nearly 4 when I rolled up to the Giant Lobster in Shediac. There is now a large building near it with a large sign proclaiming it to be the “Homarus Centre”. I was just about the right time to get a guided tour of the place. It is a lobster hatchery. They take gravid female lobsters caught in the wild and let them release their spawn in their tanks. After letting the baby lobster grow to a certain stage, they released in various locations at the behest of lobster fishers who have paid the price. Afterwards, it was hands on with a pair of their lobsters, female and male. We were then shown to a touch tank in the shape of a lobster where we could annoy various species of local marine life, including lobsters of various hues and sizes. These included orange, blue and split. The latter was longitudinally split between orange and regular colour of lobsters. Apparently, the frequency of such lobsters is about 1 in 50 million. I always feel sorry for touch tank denizens and content myself with close observation.
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