Shediac, New Brunswick, September 2007
It was dark before we arrived at our campsite, tired and hungry and eager to start dinner. We’d been traveling for several days in New Brunswick on our 2-week bicycle trip to circumnavigate the Bay of Fundy and had left a very hilly section by the Fundy National Park that morning. It was reputed to be the most remote and roadless area along the entire Eastern seaboard from Florida north. Much of the rugged, forested coastline was only accessible by approach roads, there being none than ran the length of the shoreline.
Edie was setting up the tent as I pumped the stove, turned the knob to prime the cup with fuel only to find no fuel flowing. I pumped some more, still nothing. We fiddled and played with it and then, looking forlornly at what might have been a nice, hot meal, we pulled some bread and cheese out of our panniers, tomorrow’s lunch it was to have been, and had a cold, sad meal instead.
The next day I inquired of the campground owners where the nearest outdoors shop would be. ‘Nearest OUTDOORS shop? Never heard of one. I don’t think there is one. You know of any OUTDOORS shop, Mike?’ The word ‘outdoors’ was pronounced the way you’d pronounce ‘Nuclear Test Facility’ if someone stopped you in the street and asked the whereabouts of the nearest one. Finally the yellow pages gave us hope. Xtreme Outdoor Adventures, the only listing in the book, showed a shop in Shediac, a French-Canadian enclave along New Brunswick’s sand beach coast, half a day’s cycling away. Most of that cycling would not be in the direction we were headed.
The folks at Xtreme were not altogether encouraging. ‘Your stove conked out, huh, a camping stove, right. Well, might have one, yeah here it is’. ‘Boy you must sell a lot of backpacking stoves to be down to your last one’, I replied. ‘Oh no, he chuckled, ‘we only had this one. No one’s ever asked for a stove before, so we’re selling it ½ price. I’m not sure it’s a backpacking stove. The box is kinda big, but I’m sure the stove inside is a lot smaller. You can see for yourself when you get here. By the way, it burns butane and we don’t have any cartridges but you can get ‘em at the Walmart in Moncton. You have to go through there to get to us’.
And so we did. From the barely traveled roads of coastal New Brunswick we plunged into the Saturday shopping traffic of Moncton, their 2nd biggest city. We got our cartridges as fast as possible, and we had to buy 4 of them. Nearby was a goofy looking stove that looked like someone had hacksawed off a quarter of a kitchen range and packaged it. Thank goodness we weren’t going to have to carry that monstrosity.
At Shediac we thought we’d get to see a different coastline. Beautiful sand beaches, wildlife, birds. What we saw was a strip development of small motels, fast food places and raggedy shops. Our first look at Xtreme was a 10 foot high billboard display of a girl in a bikini. I don’t remember Appalachian Outfitters or the Backpacker Shop having a sign like that. Our first sound was the loud hip-hop music coming from some sports car parked just outside. With trepidation we entered the store. Beach ware was everywhere, all of it on sale. Sandals, T-shirts, sunglasses, lotion, swimsuits. But no tents, backpacks or cookware. At the counter I greeted the fellow who recognized us from the morning phone call. ‘Say, you must be the cyclists who need that stove. I kept it right here by the front desk’. And out came the very same thing we’d seen at Walmart. Our hearts sank. When he opened it, which he’d never done before, we both were surprised to see a big, heavy ¼ kitchen range with a connector for a butane cartridge. Even at $22 it seemed ridiculous. But eating out would have cost us far more. We were still on the first week of our 2 week trip. ‘There’s no OUTDOOR shops anywhere around here’, he assured us. The nearest one’s in St. John’. St. John is the capital of New Brunswick and we’d left it behind 5 days before. Reluctantly we bought the stove, managed to strap it on the bike and pedaled on, past more strip malls, fast food joints and traffic until we found the turnoff to Sackville.
Sackville, New Brunswick
After a pleasant night’s camping at the campground just outside of Sackville, we thought we’d go into town to see the historic town center. At least that was what the sign said. After Shediac ‘New Brunswick’s finest beach resort’, we were leery. But Sackville had an old brick downtown, small, compact and very pretty. Like some rural Ohio towns, except this one was thriving. On a sunny Saturday morning the street was lively with people, many of them students from the nearby college and most of them on foot.
A local café was hosting a farmer’s market and inside were the best breads I had yet seen in the province. It was tough to choose just one amongst the many fine loaves. Edie smelled something delicious with a long line leading up to it and returned some time later with a lunch of fine Indian food cooked right there on the spot. She’d snagged their last batch.
Our best find of the day, however, was an outdoor shop. A real one. Peeking inside I saw names like North Face and Sierra Designs, Mountain Hardware and Arcteryx. In this small shop were the finest in tents, sleeping bags, clothes and…and…stoves. Right there on the shelf was the replacement for the stove that had malfunctioned. And right then and there we bought it. As it turns out, our stove began functioning again, perplexing us. It functioned fine the rest of the trip. But it might, we thought, be a good idea to take the lightweight spare parts just in case.
We chatted with the young woman in charge of the shop. We showed her our kitchen range stove and told her the story. She had a good laugh over it, then said: ‘the fellow at Xtreme knows we’re here. Why didn’t he send you to us?’ Why indeed. Hearing about an upcoming auction to raise money for a charitable cause, we decided to donate our kitchen range stove and cartridges both to perform a good deed and to lighten our weight. The young woman accepted our donation and assured us that someone, probably someone who camps from a camps from a car would be happy to bid on it.
She made a point of showing us the Arcteryx garments, well aware of the normal reaction to seeing a jacket selling for $500. ‘Everyone who looks at the price just backs off in astonishment, but I tell them to try it on just for fun, see how nicely it fits, how well it’s made and what a wonderful garment it is. About a quarter of them actually wind up buying it’. Edie and I, frugal to pennypinching were not among those quarter. But I must admit we did entertain the thought for a good ½ hour’s ride out of town, munching on chunks of that delicious bread and inhaling the aroma of our Indian feast awaiting lunchtime.
Marty
photo of the Fundy National Park, New Brunswick at low tide by Edie
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