Tom MacInnesThe links for Parts I and II of this series can be found here and here.
Day 3:
We start this day in a hotel parking lot in Edmundston, New Brunswick. The morning air is crisp and cool. Surrounding us are dozens of cars all bearing Ontario license plates. For us, today will be an odd sort of day. Our daughter’s university sits approximately one hour past the city of Halifax. From Edmunston, we could make it to Halifax in about six hours. To do so would pretty much end the driving on this part of our journey. However, before we ever left our home in Ontario, we knew that this trip was going to be about more than simply being on time for university move-in day. It was also going to be the culmination of a farewell tour that our daughter had been enjoying this whole entire summer. Prior to leaving home, Leah got to say goodbye to one group of friends at a day-long pool party in the country. Then she worked her final shift at the Library where she had been employed all throughout high school. As a family we had a final restaurant meal out together. Then Leah finished her last shift at the bookstore where she also worked. The family of her BFF took her out for a final dinner as well. At last it came time for a teary farewell to Gramma and Poppa and down the highway to the east coast we all went. But before arriving at her university town, it had been decided that we would include stops to see my mother, my cousin, as well as my sister and her husband along the way. This entailed driving past the Halifax turnoff, adding another four hours of driving…each way… to get to Cape Breton and back again. For this reason, as we stood in that hotel parking lot in Edmunston about to begin our day, instead of a six hour culmination to our trip, we were faced with the daunting prospect of a ten hour run to the ocean. Crammed as we were into our small spaces that we had carved out for ourselves in our car, with nine hours of driving already under our belts, the decision was made to limit our road exposure on this day and stop for the day in Moncton. Thus, we began today’s stage of this journey with the mindset that we were putting in time. By day’s end, we would still not be where we needed to be to see the people or the places we were really interested in seeing. But, at least, we would be a little closer. That was our reward today…to be a little closer to where we needed to be. So, into our car we climbed. We bid adieu to our Ontario compatriots in the parking lot and set off to travel through New Brunswick.
Driving through New Brunswick is a very different experience compared to driving on the 401 highway in Ontario or driving past Montreal and Quebec City. New Brunswick is all trees and forests, whereas Ontario and western Quebec are all people, cars and shopping malls. The driving can be slow and frustrating while on the 401 but in New Brunswick, the roads are wide open. For hours on end, there are barely any other vehicles on the highway with us. It is just us, the highway and a seemingly endless panorama of trees in all directions. As we drove along, my wife and I actually joked about whether the Trans Canada highway was, in fact, closed and we shouldn’t really be there. But truth be told, New Brunswick is simply this vast province that has, for the most part, retained its naturalized state and has escaped the land baron’s plows for now. It is pristine. The highways are newly constructed, making driving there rather easy. The biggest obstacle to traversing New Brunswick is actually boredom. There are trees everywhere! There is no end to them. Eventually one tires of seeing wooded mountain sides and the scenery starts blending together. It is easy to lapse into a video game mentality and lose sight of the fact that you are driving a real car filled with precious cargo over one hill and down the next, around this curve and then the one after that, eventually straightening out for a while as you are surrounded by nothing but trees, trees and more trees.
A decade or so ago, the CBC held a music contest called The Great Canadian Song Quest. The challenge was for songwriters to create original songs specifically relating to the province in which they resided. The winner of the New Brunswick portion of this contest was a man named David Myles with a song aptly titled “Don’t Drive Through”. Prior to 2010 or so, driving through New Brunswick meant driving on an old two-lane highway. If you happened to wind up stuck behind a truck carrying logs, for instance, it was easy to lose lots of time trying to get across the province. After many complaints, the Government of New Brunswick embarked on an ambitious project to build a new series of modern highways that stretched from one end of the province to the other. It is on these new highways that we find ourselves as we drive on this day. The thing about these new highways is, as David Myles duly noted in his song, that you actually bypass all of the towns and cities in the province where people live and work and go about their daily lives. With the old highway, it may have been a slower trek but at least you ended up driving through every little village and town along the way and could stop at a Mom and Pop diner or roadside vegetable stand if so inclined. Nowadays, if you don’t deliberately take an off ramp somewhere along the highway, you can drive completely across New Brunswick and see nothing at all but trees. So, in order to break up the monotony of driving endlessly through wooded hillsides, we opted to make two stops before arriving in Moncton. The first stop was the world’s longest covered bridge in Hartland, New Brunswick.
A romantic stroll across the Heartland Covered Bridge.The Hartland Covered Bridge spans the St. John River. It is a one-lane bridge that you can drive or walk across. It isn’t really all that long of a span, less than a minute’s drive and maybe three-four minutes to walk across it one way. But it is a sturdily constructed bridge. We enjoyed our little stroll across the bridge, examining all the lover’s hearts and initials that have been carved into the beams over the years. Then, like so many other tourists, when our visit to the bridge was over, we availed ourselves of their public washrooms and piled back into our car and continued on our way. Thanks for the pit stop Hartland!
Our day was divided into three ninety-minute segments. The first ninety minutes took us from Edmundston to Hartland and that epic covered bridge. From Hartland, it was another hour and a half to Fredericton, which is the provincial capital of New Brunswick. We decided to stop there for an early lunch at a diner-style restaurant called Claudine’s. After having seen next to no cars at all on the Trans Canada highway, it seemed extremely busy once we entered Fredericton proper. One thing we noticed was the preponderance of young twenty-somethings wandering around the city. Then we realized that it must have been move-in time at the University of New Brunswick, too. Dodging all of the cars and young adults and roundabouts that seemed to be everywhere, we managed to safely arrive at Claudine’s. This restaurant is located in a nondescript strip mall and doesn’t look like much from the outside. But once inside, we could tell it had been recently renovated and was the new chic hangout for those artsy university types we had been noticing. The food and service there were terrific. We would recommend Claudine’s to anyone else who happened to find themselves in search of a good meal while in “Freddy Beach”, as the locals call it. Bellies full and bladders emptied, it was time to end our drive for the day and head to Moncton.
Until we actually arrived in downtown Moncton, I had no idea the extent to which music would play a part in this day. Prior to arriving at our hotel, the radio stations we were able to tune into came either from nearby Maine, in the U.S. or else, from Fredericton and then, Moncton as we drew nearer to there. Naturally, we heard “Espresso” and “Miles On It” and the other four songs that made up our summer playlist multiple times along the way. But this isn’t the music that I am talking about. As we entered Moncton and neared our hotel, we passed Casino New Brunswick. In front was a huge neon sign promoting an upcoming two-concert visit by punk rock legends NOFX!!!! Wait, what?! Sometime earlier in the summer I had read that these legends were embarking on their final tour ever. *(You can read about NOFX from a previously written post here). Contrary to what you may think, I don’t own that many band t-shirts but I do own one by NOFX. I have respected them ever since I first learned of their existence and now, here they were in Moncton of all places as one of their final live concerts ever!!! Unfortunately for me, the concert dates didn’t jibe with our travel schedule but knowing that I was thiiiiis close to a surprise NOFX concert was enough to start the Moncton phase of this journey off on the right note for me.
When I booked our hotels for this trip, I did so with Leah’s ultimate arrival at university in mind. I did not book anywhere thinking that it might coincide with anything special that might be happening along the way. So, imagine our collective surprise when we finally arrived at our hotel and went inside. We stayed at the Hotel Beausejour, which is a reasonably swishy place for a city like Moncton. As we walked toward the door, I was semi-worried that we wouldn’t be dressed well enough (in shorts and t-shirts as we were). However, once the doors were opened, we were met with a sonic blast that knocked us all off kilter. Hotel chains are known for playing elevator-style music in their lobby areas but at this hotel, we entered to the sound of Country music playing at high, headphone-esque levels. As we approached the front desk to check in, we noticed that the staff were all wearing plaid shirts, blue jeans and straw hats! What the heck was going on here? After a bit of digging we came to learn that Moncton was set to host a three-day Country music festival called YQM Country Fest. Rising star Bailey Zimmerman was headlining on the Friday evening that we had arrived. Jason Aldean was set to headline on Saturday and Luke Combs, of “Fast Car” fame, was closing the festival as headliner on Sunday. There was a palpable sense of excitement in the air among the guests of the hotel, almost all of whom we were guessing were in town for the festival. Even in the swanky surroundings, we blended right in with everyone else when it came to our wardrobe. I needn’t have ever worried.
Eric’s Trip.Moncton may seem like a strange place to suddenly be a hotbed of musical activity but the city has a homegrown source of pride that helps it stand on its own merits as a city worthy of musical respect. In the early 1990s, a band called Eric’s Trip was formed in Moncton by singer Rick White, guitarist Chris Thompson, singer/guitarist Julie Dorion and drummer Ed Vaughn (who was later replaced by Mark Gaudet). Eric’s Trip became one of the most influential Canadian bands of their time. You may ask yourself how influential could they have been if this is the first time you are hearing about them? Well, let me tell you their story. The members of Eric’s Trip played a form of indie-alternative music that no other major band was playing in Canada at the time. Because they were living in Moncton, they were allowed the opportunity to develop their sound in a rather insulated musical environment. Eventually, in time, a cassette tape that the band had recorded themselves wound up in the hands of a record executive in Halifax. At that time in music history, the musical phenomenon known as Grunge music was exploding out of Seattle, Washington. Bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, Alice in Chains and many more were all signing major label recording deals, many with a record label called Sub Pop. The folks in charge of Sub Pop had studied the world of music promotion and had modeled Sub Pop after Berry Gordy’s Motown Records in Detroit. In their mind, they understood that Gordy had marketed a “sound” or a type of music that became synonymous with the Motown label. Sub Pop wanted to do the same with Grunge music. They wanted Sub Pop to become synonymous with the Seattle musical sound of bands such as Nirvana. Being business-oriented, the founders of Sub Pop harvested all of the available talent in the Seattle area. Then they turned their eyes to the rest of the world, in search of that next great Grunge-ready Seattle clone. Eventually, this brought Sub Pop executives to Halifax in the early 1990s. At the time, the Halifax music scene was exploding with talent such as Sloan, a very young Sarah McLachlan, Joel Plaskett and his band Thrush Hermit and many more. When local music types started organizing showcases for the visiting Sub Pop executives, one of the bands that caught their ears was Eric’s Trip. Because Eric’s Trip had developed outside of the Halifax bubble, they were perceived by Sub Pop as being fresher, with greater future potential and, as such, they were the very first Canadian band ever signed to the increasingly famous Sub Pop label. Eric Trip’s brand of indie-alternative lo-fi pop rock came just as the Grunge wave was cresting in the U.S. In Canada, that placed them at the leading edge of this movement here. While Eric’s Trip didn’t end up selling that many albums nor lasting a very long time as a band, their influence on other bands is what really makes them important. No less a band than The Tragically Hip name dropped them in their song “Put It Off” from Trouble at the Henhouse with the line that reads “I played Love Tara by Eric’s Trip on the day that you were born” Love Tara was the title of Eric’s Trip’s first album. Because of the role that this band and album played in influencing the development of alternative music in Canada, Love Tara is viewed as one of the most respected and important Canadian albums of all time. The song “Viewmaster”, which I am showcasing in this post, will seem like something you have probably heard before which, in turn, may cause you to wonder what all the fuss was about. The fuss comes in knowing that what you are watching is musical history unfolding before your eyes. Someone always has to go first when starting something new. For me and many others as well, Eric’s Trip went first in Canada when it came to indie/alternative music.
Love Tara by Eric’s Trip.Always an anti-Halifax/proudly Monctonian band, Eric’s Trip and the song “Viewmaster” is what was rolling through my head as we took a family stroll along the Petitcodiac River after supper. This river holds a special place in our hearts because, on an earlier visit when the girls were much younger, we dubbed this river as being “The Chocolate River”. You see, the waters of the Petitcodiac River are crystal clear but the sediment of its banks and riverbed are decidedly a red-brown colour. This, in turn, causes the flowing water to resemble chocolate. Even though Moncton was never our intended final destination, we are all happy to be here. The city has done a good job of developing walking trails along the river. There are also plenty of restaurants, gas stations and grocery stores near the hotel district. On this visit, the excitement of music royalty coming to their city can be felt everywhere we went. It is nice to be in a place where the vibe is so upbeat and party-like. But while we are happy to stroll along the banks of the Chocolate River while eating ice cream, we have other places to be and people to see. Our real journey begins tomorrow. Cape Breton Island awaits and with it, so do important members of my family. Tonight I will wrap myself and my family in the joyous musical atmosphere that Moncton exudes. Tomorrow, it is time to go home.
The link to the video for the song “Viewmaster” by Eric’s Trip can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.
The link to the official website for Eric’s Trip can be found here.
The link to the video for the song “Don’t Drive Through” by David Myles can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.
The link to the official website for David Myles can be found here.
The link to the official website for the province of New Brunswick can be found here.
The link to the official website for the city of Hartland, New Brunswick can be found here.
The link to the official website for the city of Fredericton, New Brunswick can be found here.
The link to the official website for the city of Moncton, New Brunswick can be found here.
***As always, all original content contained within this post remains the sole property of the author. No portion of this post shall be reblogged, copied or shared in any manner without the express written consent of the author. ©2024 http://www.tommacinneswriter.com
#EricsTrip #GreatBigSea #HartlandCoveredBridge #LoveTara #NewBrunswick #NOFX #TheGreatCanadianRoadTrip #Viewmaster #Moncton
