Unlike their US counterparts, Canadian Walmarts have WiFi, which is great.  At the Walmart, we bought a Chatr SIM card for our unlocked phone.  $60 Canadian (about $45 US) buys unlimited in-Canada calling and 2GB of data for a month.  Like the last time we visited Canada, I used a free Canadian DID from Les.net and a free PBXes.com account to route inbound and outbound US calls through a Canadian phone number to avoid Chatr’s $0.20 a minute international call fee.  As far as Chatr is concerned, it’s a free domestic Canadian call, and I pay fifteen-hundredths of a cent per minute to Les.net for making the Canada to US portion of the call.  Not too shabby!  See the link above for diagrams and more geek-talk.

Today we drove east to Fundy National Park, which preserves one of the last Acadian forests in New Brunswick:

We hiked the Caribou Plain trail.  The trail leads to a viewpoint overlooking a bog.  The bog here is about 12 feet thick, with successive layers of sphagnum moss growing on top of each other, leaving older layers below to accumulate as undecayed peat.  At this viewpoint, the peat pile is so thick that the pile slumped as it slid downhill, leaving a water-filled depression called a flark:

The kids dropped sticks and rocks into the flark to test its quicksand-like characteristics.  From time to time, moose become mired in the flark and die if not rescued in time:

After finishing the hike, we continued east.  We ran into road work, which reminded us of Alaska:

We reached the visitor center for the park:

The kids completed their Parks Canada Xplorers workbooks and received their dog tags:

We went for a hike on the Dickson Falls trail:

Silver Falls it ain’t, but it was still pretty:

We drove down to the shore of the Bay of Fundy:

Leaving the park, we continued east and happened upon this lovely turnoff with access to the bay:

This is the first sandy beach we’ve seen on the Bay of Fundy:

We were chased off the beach by a thunderstorm, so we continued east and north to Moncton, New Brunswick.  The plan was to spend Shabbos with the Jewish community here, but the parking didn’t work out so we drove to the other side of town where we will be parked at the Casino New Brunswick.

Good Shabbos from Moncton, New Brunswick!  See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.