Tales From the Minivan

Living in Saint John, NB definitely has it’s fair share of positives and negatives, but by far the worst has to be the FOG!  Saint John is the 3rd Foggiest City in Canada  with 98.29 foggy days per year. Second place goes to Halifax, NS with 99.53, and first place goes to St. John’s, NL with a whopping 118.96 days per year!!

I am 35 years old, and for the majority of my 35 years I have lived in Saint John, NB.  In those 35 years, I can honestly count on both hands the number of times that our Canada Day Fireworks have actually gone off on Canada Day.  “Why didn’t they go off?”, you ask.  They were fogged out, and this year was no different!  It was looking optimistic in the afternoon, then that late afternoon breeze brought the fog back in from the Bay of Fundy.  Living close to the harbour, also has it’s advantages and disadvantages too. One disadvantage being the Saint John Harbour’s foghorn, it could easily wake the dead!

Canada Day started off nicely, I got the whole crew dressed in denim and red shirts and we sauntered our way uptown.  Saint John does not have a “downtown”, only and uptown.  I never really understood this, but this is the way it’s always been.  Maybe I’ll have to look into the history of this some day!

  Finn rode on my back for the entire afternoon in my Ergo Carrier.  I can not say enough positive things about this carrier.  It really is amazingly comfortable even carrying a 25lb toddler for hours!  My favorite part is the extra padding in the waist band and the shoulder straps.  My only wish is that they’d come out with some more colourful designs or fabrics.  So ErgoBaby Inc. if you’re listening, you need to “pimp your carriers” as CPO’s Moderator of our Baby Wearing Board would say!

After walking around uptown and looking through all of the JUNK at the Giant Uptown Flea Market, we spotted a sign near the foot of King Street that said “Free Trolley Rides- 1pm, 2:30pm & 4pm”.  I instantly looked at my watch and got excited it was 2:25pm and then realized we must have just missed it as no one was waiting. I asked a gentleman sitting there and he confirmed it.  He did mention though that the driver was ahead of schedule and would most likely be back around 3:30pm instead of 4pm.  So we walked over to Market Square’s Boardwalk area to kill some time.

I’ve wanted to take one of these Trolley rides for a while now and actually mentioned wanting to take the kids on a tour in our latest episode of Momtalk Podcast called Your Perfect Staycation.  Here’s a little history on Saint John’s Trolley’s- one of the tour agencies in the city bought them a few years ago.  They are the San Francisco style ones made to look like street cars, incidentally Saint John, NB was actually the first city in Canada to have a Street Car. Well as you can see by the photo to the right we arrived back just in time to get the last free tour!  Ciaran fell asleep 3/4 of the way through, but I think the kids really enjoyed it and learned a few cool facts about Saint John, I know I did!

Our Canada Day Fireworks were postponed 3 nights in a row, then finally on the 4th of July, us Saint Johner’s got to witness a great show!

Earlier in the evening I hauled out my camera’s manual and looked up what setting would be the best for fireworks. I have to admit as much as I love my digital SLR, the amount of different settings are overwhelming, I really need to take a course!  We parked the minivan down by the waterfront and flipped the rear bench seat over so the kids could sit there and watch. This is one of the cool features I like in our van! Here’s a few shots from the evening:

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Baby Wearing, Special Occasions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.