Day Trips

Within just a couple of hours drive from Moncton you'll be able see some of the most amazing sights and participate in some of the most exciting activities anywhere. Stay in Moncton and explore the region and return each night for our world-class hospitality and our commitment to making your stay as comfortable and convenient as possible.

A Tour of Moncton
The "Indian Church" at Beaumont
The Contrast of the Dunes
The Road that Hugs the Strait
Underground Lakes - Adventure in the Woods
ÉCONOMUSÉE

Moncton Tour

Moncton stretches along the Petitcodiac River roughly in east/west direction; its three main streets similarly run more or less east west. This driving tour points out a few somewhat idiosyncratic highlights along them.
As you come east along Main Street from Dieppe, the bridge across Hall's Creek marks the beginnings of the oldest part of Moncton. In the late 1800's to early 1900's the riverbank was lined with wharves from about Hall's Creek to well past Bore Park. Old timers can still remember schooners and trading ships docking here to discharge kegs of molasses from the West Indies, coal, and other goods; these were then taken by draft horse to the nearby brick warehouses of the wholesaling companies. Communication was then largely by water; indeed one Moncton company timed its annual sales to coincide with the tides so that shoppers from down river could come to town on a rising tide and leave again on the falling tide.

Continuing West along Main Street takes you past some of the older merchants buildings from this period. Curiously, the North side of the street seems to have been more kindly to heritage buildings; most of the ones on the South side being gone. Noteworthy among the survivors is the elegant brownstone "Merchants Bank" building across from the Delta Beausejour Hotel. Like many other old business buildings this also is built of local sandstone, a memento of the active building stone and grindstone quarrying industry, which flourished in the area. Between Main Street and the river was pretty much all industry, shipbuilding, sawmills and foundries. The names Foundry Street and Mechanic Street date from that time.
Now you'll come to another Moncton landmark, the railway underpass, known locally as the "subway," a name which sometimes perplexes visitors. It's built just low enough that three or four times a year incautious transport trucks fail to make the passage.

Continuing West on Main Street takes you past the Crowne Plaza, the unmistakeably governmental stalinist gothic of the "old" post office and Highfield Square Shopping Mall. Turning right, up Cameron Street, and crossing St. George Street, the second main east-west artery, takes you through older residential areas to Victoria Park, a small downtown green space donated by three Moncton businessmen in the late 1800s. From here, turn left onto John Street, and left onto Vaughan Harvey Boulevard, followed by a right onto Main Street. This leads you to Jones Lake.

At "Jones Lake", an artificial lake just under 1 km West along Main Street from Highfield Square, old Moncton ended. If you drive here in the spring, watch out for the mother ducks crossing Main Street with their little ducklings tagging single file behind them. Past this lay railway yards and industry on the left. The brick complex of the former Swifts meat packing plant still stands in this open area at some distance from the street. This was once a major employer, and there is an amusing story that on one occasion this company paid all its employees in two dollar bills, so that, by this unusual flood of purchases made with two dollar bills, the grocers and other merchants would notice just how much Swifts contributed to the local economy.

Now you'll come to the traffic circle at the Moncton side of the causeway to Riverview on the opposite side of the Petitcodiac. Taking the first right exit off the traffic circle and then swinging right again onto St. George Street takes you east toward the centre of town again, past Centennial Park on your left, an area of walkways in the woods. The old steam locomotive number 5270 at the entrance to the park testifies to Moncton's railroad heritage from the Intercolonial and then Canadian National. The stretch of St. George Street just past Centennial Park is known as the "Golden Mile," one of the first non-central concentrations of business.

After the major intersection where Vaughan Harvey crosses St. George Street, you're back in "old" Moncton. This section was more or less Moncton's second business street. The massive Assomption Cathedral, built in the 1940s is a landmark here; on the opposite side, at 199 St. George Street, a former fire station. A little further on, across the railway tracks and at the corner of Botsford and St. George you'll come to the former Aberdeen School, now a flourishing cultural centre of galleries, a theatre, and working artists and performers.

Just past this, St. George Street meets King Street, which in turn becomes Mountain Road, the third major east west street. Swinging left onto King Street takes you to the Moncton Museum, whose facade is the reconstructed entryway to Moncton's old City Hall, which used to stand downtown in the vicinity of the Delta Beausejour Hotel/Assumption Place complex. Immediately adjacent to the Museum is the "Free Meeting House" a carefully preserved heritage property, originally built in 1821, it seems, to offer the shipbuilding labourers of the time a more salubrious place to frequent than the taverns which up to then had been their chief entertainment. Over the years, it has become an interdenominational place of worship and is used for other purposes as well.
Here, you're almost back to where the tour started.

The “Indian Church” at Beaumont

As a kid growing up in the area, that's the name is was always known as, the "Indian Church". But its correct designation is Saint Anne's Chapel, and the drive there from Moncton is one of the most scenic in the region no matter what time of year.
From the centre of Moncton drive east on Main Street, past the Chateau Moncton hotel on your right, past Champlain Place shopping mall on your left. Turn right at the major intersection. You are now on NB Route 106. Continue approximately 8 km, turn right onto the Dover Road, Route 925 and stay on this road. From here, the distance to Beaumont is about 20 Km.

This is a solidly Acadian French region. Yet, just about where the road comes downhill onto the flats, you'll note mailboxes bearing typically Albert County English names like "Steeves." Solidly English, Albert County lies just across the river, and this small English language enclave is a memento of the times when communication was by water.

In the village of Belliveau, en route to Beaumont, you can't miss the large "Belliveau Orchard" on the westerly facing hillsides. It's been there for over 80 years, and is the consequence of a particularly favourable microclimate. "It warms up early in the spring here," says co-owner Robert Bourgeois, "and stays warm late into the fall. Just five miles away, it's the other way around." Also in Belliveau Village look for the small road leading to the Belliveau Wharf. Now almost unused and falling into disrepair, this imposing structure once harboured a considerable fleet of shad and salmon fishermen. The wharf is closed to cars, but you can walk out onto it. At low tide, you're way up over the muddy river bottom; while at high tide the water comes nearly to the top of the Wharf.

Strategically situated at the tip of the cape, Beaumont itself is said to have been an Indian encampment before European settlers arrived. However, archaeological research done in 1992-94 for the Fort Folly band was unable to confirm this. Nonetheless, by the mid 1800's, nearby Memramcook had one of the largest Indian populations in the region, and in 1840 the New Brunswick Legislature acquired some 60 acres of land at Beaumont to replace a former Indian settlement in the vicinity of Dorchester, to be held "by the magistrates of Westmoreland County," in trust, for the Mi'kmaq.

The chapel was built in 1842, either entirely by the Indians, or by the French and natives working together. Saint Anne's Chapel is thus the first chapel built by and for the Mi'kmaq people of New Brunswick and was declared a historic site in 1989. The chapel contractor was Hilaire Louis Arsenault who built several churches both in New Brunswick and in Nova Scotia, while the altar is believed to be by Thomas Berlinguet (1790-1863) "A well known sculptor/architect who also created the Quebec National Assembly and Saint Thomas Church in Saint Joseph."

Both Mi'kmaq and French lived on the small reserve, and both attended the church, and also the small Beaumont School whose foundations were located and investigated in the course of the archeological work mentioned above.
In 1881, 40 people are reported to have been living on the reserve, "in four log cabins and ten wigwams." But the land was rough and stony, ill-suited for cultivation. It had been logged over already, and by the turn of the century the local quarrying industry also had essentially ceased. As a side trip, if you drive a short distance uphill just before the church, and turn left, you'll come to the "Boudreau Quarry" whose olive coloured sandstone was extensively quarried for export to the United States in the 1850-1880 period; the Dakota Building in New York City where John Lennon was shot is built in part with stone from this quarry, and six miles of walkway in Central Park are ornamented with it as well. Also, a few hundred yards past the church, immediately the right side of the dirt road you'll see a deep water-filled pit. Here, pulp stones (used to grind logs into pulp for paper-making) and other grindstones were once quarried.

Unable to farm, without wood to log, and with prospects for other employment diminished, people drifted away from Beaumont. In 1913, only three or four families were left. The Beaumont school closed in 1937, the post office in 1953; by 1955 the last family was gone.

The Mi'kmaq of the Fort Folly band gravitated back to Dorchester. By the early 1930's they began requesting the Federal Government to sell the property at Beaumont and to apply the proceeds to acquiring a reserve nearer to Dorchester. That request unleashed no less than 40 years of letter writing. A perplexing issue was who exactly held title to the land at Beaumont. The property had been deeded to the "magistrates of Westmoreland County and their successors," and after almost 100 years, no one had a very good idea who these successors might actually be. Thus in 1966 the New Brunswick Legislature dissolved the original trust of 1844, but there still seems to be some doubt whether it had the jurisdiction to do so.

The little "Indian Church" overlooking the river meanwhile has undergone something of a revival as a historical attraction and a venue for countryside driving. Just before you reach the church, if you take the uphill road to the Boudreau quarry, and continue on, you'll cross the peninsula to come out at Cormier Cove, another very pretty drive, this time along the Memramcook River. But it's a dirt road, and particularly in the spring when the ground is still wet, you'll want to have your sense of adventure in high gear and your four wheel drive in low.

The Contrast of the Dunes

Developed and natural dunes on the Acadian Shore
Moncton lies at what you might call the juncture between two distinctly different landforms. Actually, they're probably better called sea forms.

To the North, we have the Gulf of St. Lawrence, shallow, with a slight tidal range, and protected from the open ocean by Prince Edward Island, which, by the way, did not become an island until just a few thousand years ago, very recently in geological terms. To the South, we have the Bay of Fundy, where conditions are quite different. Here, the tides rise and fall 40 to 50 feet twice a day.

On each tide, a 100 cubic kilometres of water flow in and out of the Bay, which is more than the combined daily discharge of all the rivers in the world. Under such powerful erosive action, the Bay of Fundy is a seascape of cliffs, while the Gulf of St. Lawrence is characterized by vast stretches of sand beaches and dunes.

The Bouctouche Dune is one such dune system. It is made somewhat unique by the intervention of man; a dune which, as you might say, has been "discovered." Twelve kilometres long, it stretches like a giant claw of sand and dune grass in a southerly direction into the mouth of Bouctouche Bay. This shape indicates that the prevailing current here runs from the north, carrying sand with it in a process called "longshore drift." The tip of the dune curls inward where the current eddies into the Bay.

Fifteen years ago, the dune was simply there, immense and mysterious. You parked your car at an access spot a bit off the road and that was that. But the presence of a rare species there, the piping plover, brought the dune into wider notice; now, there's an interpretive centre and boardwalks snake along the sand. At the centre you can learn all about dune ecology. There's even a live video feed (in season, and depending upon the availability of the performers) into a bank swallow nest. By now, some 1,000 people visit the dune daily in the summers, a figure which doubles and triples on weekends, a far cry from the unfrequented natural attraction of years past. Yet still, despite boardwalks and development, a dune is a living, ever changing thing, created by wind and waves, and constantly modified by them. A recent winter storm, for instance, took a considerable amount of the boardwalk with it and transported that elsewhere. The man and nature interface can be an uncomfortable one.

To get to the dune, take either NB Rt. 134 "the old road" north from Moncton, or highway 11, the "new highway." Bouctouche and the dune lie some 45 km from Moncton. If you're exploring, go off the highway entirely and follow the shore roads which snake along the coast through a multitude of fishing villages like Grand Digue, Caissie Cape, Cormierville and Cocagne whose names read like an Acadian litany.

This is Acadian country, peopled by the descendants of the French Acadian settlers who were expelled from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in 1755, and little by little drifted back. Their odyssey, and traditional Acadian life, is celebrated in the "Pays de La Sagouine" theme park in Bouctouche. For those who don't know, "La Sagouine" is the Acadian cleaning lady character in Antonine Maillet's celebrated book/play of the same name, who, with trenchant and folksy wit, gives observations on her own life and that of her neighbours in the close-to-the-soil Acadian dialect. The theme park offers insights into that traditional Acadian life of fishing, farming and work in the woods, as well as Acadian music, plays, and re-enactments.

And now for the contrast. If you continue along the shore roads (Routes 475 and 505) for approximately another 20 kilometres past Bouctouche you'll come to Cap Lumiere dune. This stands in dramatic contrast to the boardwalks of Bouctouche. Here, you'll see almost no one. You might call it the Bouctouche Dune "au naturel." You can also take exit 42, Saint Anne de Kent, off Route 11, the "new highway", from which Cap Lumiere lies another 17 km ahead along Route 505. Continue past the lighthouse and the wharf to where the pavement ends and the road becomes a sandy track.

What seems like an eternity of sand and silence of stretches before you as you walk the shore. Black ducks paddle about, seagulls patrol the shoreline and terns dive for prey in the shallow water. You'll hear only the sound of the waves and an occasional fishing boat. Behind the dune lies the intriguingly named "La Mocaque du Cap" "The Muskeg of the Cape", a bog area which probably has helped preserve the Cap Lumiere dune from cottage construction.

It's not that the beach is never used. It is. Footprints, charred wood and occasional debris testify to that. It's just that its use has never been defined. No one imposes a conception of what it should be, nor tries to teach you anything. It's just simply and beautifully and silently there, the way many beaches once were, but few remain.

The Road that Hugs the Strait

Because the Northumberland Strait is shallower, with much less tidal action than the Bay of Fundy the water here has time to warm up. It gives back its summer warmth well into autumn. The Strait breathes an aura of gentleness, almost opulence, which is quite missing from the Bay of Fundy. Early settled by French Acadians, this is a land of sandy beaches, cottages, and farmland. This tour along the Strait can easily take a full day. It might take you two days, depending on how much exploring you want to do off the main roads.

Start by taking the Trans-Canada to Sackville, a pleasant university and farming town nearly surrounded by the Tantramar Marsh, the largest area of dyked salt marsh in North America. Continue on past Sackville (or through it - the drive takes you right back onto the Trans Canada) and continue to exit 550 B, to Prince Edward Island. Set your km counter at zero here, and head toward PEI.

At 20 km, turn right onto NB 970, the "old road" to Baie Verte and Port Elgin. Here, immediately in the turn, you'll see Hans Esser's European bakery, the first indication of the Strait area's concentration of recent German immigrants. Intriguing as it is, the story of how this came about is too long to tell here.

At 21.8 km, turn right onto NB 970 South. In 2 km you'll come to Werner Rosswog's Farm Distillery. Rosswog, a former bank manager from Baden, Germany, originally intended to farm. When this turned out unpromising, he began what in ten years has become a thriving artisanal distillery and farm wine shop. The shop is open at regular hours; the whole process can be seen in Sunday afternoon tours at 2 pm.

Continue on 970 to the delightful little country store at 28.3 km, then cross the main highway to view the stone arch bridge, a relic of the "Ship Railway Canal" which was used to transport ships on railcars running on a double line of track across the isthmus from the Bay of Fundy to the Strait. Note how wide the bridge is. Now go back to the "T" junction of 970 South and 970 North. Head north, through Baie Verte, an old Acadian settlement. Everything here speaks age and heritage, the old stores and churches, and houses with shrubs in front as thick as treetrunks from a hundred years of growth.

Baie Verte and Port Elgin were intimately linked to the Tantramar French Acadian settlements by the old French road connecting Fort Beauséjour, Baie Verte, and Fort Gaspereau at Port Elgin where French supply ships docked en route from Louisbourg to Quebec. Fort Street in Port Elgin takes you there, albeit there's not much left to see.
NB 960, which turns right off the main highway just past Port Elgin, hugs the shore and takes you to Cape Tormentine, the former busy ferry terminal. But so does the main highway. There's a tourist bureau in the old railway station; you can walk out to the old ferry docks (at your own risk - it's not encouraged but it can be done) to fish mackeral in late summer along with the locals, there's a lovely sandy beach here too on the right side of the old ferry terminal, and a spectacular view of the bridge to PEI. At the foot of the bridge lies Cape Jourimain, the closest land point to Prince Edward Island, about to become a government nature preserve.

In Murray Corner, on NB 955 and a few km past the bridge to Prince Edward you'll come to Johnny Lake's store, as real and down to earth as the nearby little fishing wharf. Here you can buy copper tube and coffee and coconut flakes and camp fuel and door hardware, mousetraps, ice cream, bread and fishermen's gloves. This is a general store that deserves the name. There aren't many left.

And now come two highlights of this excursion. About 8 km past Johnny Lake's store, turn right down the patched, paved, road to Amos Point. Shrubs crowd close on both sides, giving it a sort of jungle feel. And there you are, at the almost utterly unknown Amos Point wharf. Here, with tide running out of the Little Shemogue estuary, you may see 30 or 40 blue heron, and bald eagles on the flats. A several kilometre stretch of sand dune lies just across the channel from the wharf. Lobster boats are tied up, and usually there's not a soul in sight in this solitary seaside world.

Back on the main road just under 2km further, a driveway through the woods takes you to the Little Shemogue Inn, an in its own way. A baby grand piano stands in the foyer, a Persian samovar rests upon a table of exotic wood which encircles a dish of hammered metal from Tanzania. The armrests of a wicker chair from Southeast Asia assume the shape of elephant trunks in draping down. Crystal wine glasses grace the table; classical music plays in the background; hummingbirds dart amid the flowers. A hidden enclave of civilization a stone's throw from the silent oasis of Amos Point, the Little Shemogue Inn is run by Klaus Sudbrack - another German emigrant who first tried farming.
Four kilometres further along the main road, turn right to loop around Johnson's Point, another solitary peninsula of farms and beaches and tidal estuaries. The Johnson's Point Road emerges just a few hundred metres from the main highway, Route 15, which carries you on to Shediac and the famous Parlee Beach, home of bikinis and beach volleyball, and all that that entails. And from Shediac, in turn the next coast hugging jaunt will take you to the dunes of Bouctouche and Cap Lumière and the Pays de La Sagouine.

The “Underground Lake” - Adventure in the Woods

Probably the most popular off road destination in the Moncton area is the little gypsum cavern in Albert County universally known as "the underground lake". Getting there entails a ten minute, uphill walk through the woods, and you'll have to cross a brook en route, but usually some unknown kindly person has felled a tree cross it by way of improvised footbridge.

You can do this as a loop - go to Albert Mines, to the underground lake, and then continue on along the Albert Mines road to come back out on the main highway NB 114. Here, if you turn left, that is, back toward Moncton, the drive will take you to the celebrated Hopewell Rocks just a short distance ahead. Or, if you turn right on NB 114, you'll eventually come to Fundy Park.

So here we go - first of all to the "underground lake." From downtown Moncton, head toward Riverview on the South side of the Petitcodiac, immediately on the Riverview side of the bridge, set your km counter to zero. Turn left, and drive 26 km on Route 114, which leads to Fundy Park. Turn right at the "Albert Mines" road sign. At about 3.5 km down this road, you'll go down a steep hill. Look for the old church on the right. Turning right here will take you to the remnants (of which there are not many) of the celebrated albertite mine, the object of a famous geological lawsuit in 1852. Albertite, a shiny, black, natural bitumen discovered by maritime geologist Dr. Abraham Gesner, was the first raw material in the manufacture of kerosene, before the advent of oil wells in 1859. Hence it occupies an important place in early petroleum history. But that's another story. Getting there entails driving along a dirt road which is all but impassable when the frost comes out of the ground in the spring, but otherwise is quite do-able in the family car, albeit sometimes with caution, and slowly. The overgrown mine dumps lie at a fork in the dirt road, and 2.7 km from the corner at the white church.

But on to the underground lake, instead of turning right at the white church stay on the Albert Mines Road. Go through the village. At around 5 km from where you turned off 114 (or 31.5 km from Moncton), note the piles of gypsum. It was extensively quarried here, in the past, and still is on a small scale. Some of this is sculptural grade alabaster. Indeed, Randy Simon, the MicMac carver of Big Cove in Kent County, carved a nativity scene in Albert County alabaster which now graces the Canadian Embassy in France. Note the quarry on the right at 5.7 km, the one with a chain running across the access. At the next telephone pole on your right just past this quarry, turn right onto the narrow dirt road. Go 1 km. Just past the downhill "S" curve in the road, turn left off the road and park in the small glade. Now the fun begins.

You'll have to cross the brook. Most often there's a tree felled across it, but not always. Follow the path that runs uphill on the other side of the brook. In about 10 minutes, you'll come to an imposing vertical cliff face on the right side of the path. The cavern lies at the bottom of the steep slope facing this cliff. You'll need to scramble down to get there. This is a gypsum cave, and since gypsum dissolves rapidly in rainwater (which is how such caverns form) but disintegrates in large blocks, you won't see any stalactites or stalagmites. Note how cold it is inside. Snow can last here until well into July.

Having visited the lake, continue on the Albert Mines road 4.5 km then turn left. This takes you back out onto the main highway, route 114. Turning right here will take to the famous "Rocks" at Hopewell which lie just ahead.
In contrast to the underground lake, which is one of those almost secret little places in the woods which people know about but which no-one has ever done anything with, "the Rocks" is (or are) very distinctly a developed destination, with walkways, restaurants, shops and bus tours. Here, you'll see the classic geological formation known as sea stacks. The conglomerate rock here is carved away at the bottom by the tides and winter ice of the Bay of Fundy, leaving standing pinnacles, which narrow toward the bottom. You can walk along the shore here at low tide, exploring in between the pinnacles - but be careful. The Fundy tide rises rapidly, and dramatically, and if you don't keep a close eye on what the tide is doing, your way back might be cut off.

From the Rocks, the road south (NB 114) leads to Fundy Park. If you head that way, you should make a point of checking out the Crooked Creek Look Off in the village of Riverside Albert, a spectacular hilltop view along the Crooked Creek Gorge below.