Wednesday, September 25, 2012.
New England-Canada Cruise Journal, Day Five: Saint John, New Brunswick.
Most cruise itineraries include a dud port. In the Western Caribbean, it's Grand Cayman. In Scandinavia, it's Oslo. The route for most cruises in New England and Canada includes a stop in Saint John, the major port of the Bay Of Fundy. Therein lies the place's primary point of interest. The Bay of Fundy has the world's greatest variance between high and low tides, at times approaching thirty feet. This creates exactly one tourist attraction: the so-classed Reversing Falls, a series of rapids on the St. John River. When the tide rises, the tidal water pushes up the river until it's balanced by the substantial flow of the river. At that point there are waves and whirlpools that give the illusion of going backwards. Mary Ann and I observed this from a window table in a seafood restaurant that overlooks the spot, on our first fall cruise in 2006.
We were not motivated to see it again. I didn't even leave the ship, needing a day off from the relentless push of Mary Ann's explorations. The Marys were gone most of the day, of course, looking for anything interesting. The best they found was that the nice new cruise terminal in Saint John (which, by the way, is always spelled out, to distinguish itself from two other Canadian cities named for the Apostle) had free, high-speed wireless internet.
I wish I'd known about that service sooner, because it would have saved me a lot of money and trouble wrangling with the insanely slow internet aboard ship. Of all the disadvantages of ship travel, this is the most vexing. Well, I was at last able to download all the email that's piled up in the last five days--if not to answer it.
Mary Ann was furious about Saint John's being on the cruise agenda. She is still stewing about being prevented from going to Acadia National Park yesterday, and will be addressing Cunard about this perceived imbalance. I wish her luck with that.
Last night, at the Eat Club's nightly gathering for cocktails, five of our number buttonholed me with their own request for change. They said that they didn't feel sufficiently integrated with the other members of the group, and that I should hold an event at which everyone could learn the names of everyone else. I replied that I wasn't sure of all the names myself, and that name tags had been soundly rejected in past cruises.
But today I moved our pre-dinner cocktail spot to a corner of the lightly-populated Veuve Clicquot lounge. The chairs there were much easier to pull into a circle there--a project in which the servers were eager to help. This seems to have solved the problem, and for the rest of the cruise at least two-thirds of the Eat Clubbers showed up for the newly-enlivened drink-o-rama.
That would prove to be the only issue to well up among my charges during the cruise. No previous group was as friendly, pleasant, and fun-loving as this one.
