New Brunswick Week: First Stop, St. Andrews-by-the-Sea

Kingsbrae Garden, St Andrews For the past two decades, Canada’s Atlantic Maritimes and particularly New Brunswick have been one of my favorite outdoor playgrounds to sea kayak, bike, and hike in or around the Bay of Fundy waters. But it’s not just the stunning granite ledges, huge tidal shifts, and towering pines that beckon. The majestic scenery certainly excites, but it’s the people of this province and their distinctive passions that keep me returning as often as possible.

Take, for example, one Mrs. Lucinda Flemer of St. Andrews. In 1998, she had the brilliant idea of taking the century-old hedges and boxed gardens of her youth and creating arguably the most magical botanical garden in Canada. In 2010, I was so enraptured with the 27-acre grounds that I named the Kingsbrae Garden one of my top travel destinations of the year, competing with trips to Africa, Europe, and Latin America that year. When I returned yesterday, I was even more impressed. The yearly sculpture contests in the garden has led to one of the largest permanent sculpture gardens in Canada. The perennials were still in bloom, as they are throughout the spring, summer, and fall. This time, the pinkish-purple echinacea radiated throughout the garden. The sensory garden is just as seductive to touch and smell as I happily felt the velvety lamb’s ear and inhaled the powerful lemon scented geraniums.

Next door to the garden is Kingsbrae International Residence for the Arts and a glorious amphitheater for outdoor concerts and performances created in 2016. Monthlong arts residences are open to artists, sculptors, writers, and filmmakers and I had the good fortune to meet one illustrator working on a children’s book based on the groundbreaking work on indigenous culture, Braiding Sweetgrass. Now a nonagenarian, Mrs. Flemer was also seen walking the grounds, her imagination still fertile as she continues to build on her whimsical creation. She continues to inspire the next generation of horticulturalists, botanists, sculptors, artists, chefs (as evidenced by the innovative fare we had for lunch in Garden Café) and yes, even travel writers.

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Top Travel Days of 2021, Exploring New Brunswick’s Fundy Trail Parkway

Long Bach, Fundy Trail Parkway In September, I had the good fortune to return to New Brunswick, Canada, once the border finally reopened to Americans. 23 years after the Fundy Trail Parkway debuted in 1998, the extension of the 30-kilomter drive to nearby Fundy National Park was finally finished. My friend, Jeff, and I drove some 90 minutes from Saint John to reach the East Gate of the Fundy Trail Parkway. Within five minutes, we were at our first stop, Walton Glen Gorge, where the granite spans some 900 meters wide. We walked the short kilometer walk to the observation tower and soon were staring in awe at Little Salmon River as it surges through the Eye of the Needle.

The waters of the Bay of Fundy were by our side the rest of the day. A series of lookouts soon followed on the left as we peered down at the verdant slopes sliding into the sea, not unlike the Cabot Trail on Cape Breton. It only gets better from here. Long Beach is a marvel to behold, stretching about a third of a mile out to sea at low tide. We walked some 2 kilometers on a loop and it was honestly hard to tear me away from this spot. We found colorful green, gray, and granite pebbles, fantastic rock formations, and ripples of sand on the ocean floor that would be awash in water in a matter of hours. Edward Weston would have a field day here and so would any other photographer.

For lunch, we headed to the Cookhouse for a fantastic turkey sandwich, where the meat is processed by Chef Tracy’s turkey farmer neighbor on bread that was baked that morning. Afterwards, we opted for the insanely good molasses cake and walked around the room peering at the century-old photographs of loggers cutting down the cherished white pine to build tall masts at the shipping port of Saint John. To work off lunch, we strolled across the suspension bridge at Salmon River, where the waters were once teeming with so much salmon you could practically walk across the river. After one last requisite stop at Fuller Falls to see the water cascading down the slick rock into the Bay of Fundy, we arrived at the West Gate and the seaside town of St. Martins, the end of a magical coastal drive.

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Hieronymus Bosch Turns 500

Seven years ago, the director of a small museum in the Netherlands set out on an impossible quest: he wanted to borrow every surviving work in the world by the wildest imagination in the history of art, Hieronymus Bosch, to celebrate his 500th anniversary in the city of his birth. In an exhibition opening in February (February 13-May 8), Charles de Mooij will unveil his haul at his Noordbrabants museum in Den Bosch, officially known as ‘s-Hertogenbosch. He has secured 20 of the 25 surviving panels, including several reunited triptychs, and 19 of the 25 drawings, a collection he believes will never be assembled again. Many of the paintings could only travel because money from the Getty Foundation paid for state-of-the-art conservation work to clean the surfaces of the oak panels. This small Dutch city is planning to go bonkers with Bosch fever. There will be moving projections of Bosch paintings in the marketplace, and 3D recreations of angels, demons, damned souls, mermaids riding on flying fish, drunken priests, lascivious women, and monsters with the legs of a giant chicken and the body of an egg. Sounds like one exhibition that should not be missed. 

 
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Musee de la Civilisation A Must-Stop in Quebec City

Quebec City’s Musee de la Civilisation might sound like some vague museum of anthropology. Venture inside and you’ll be surprised to find one of the most intriguing museums in North America. On my last trip to Quebec City, I was treated to an exhibition called Urbanopolis, an architectural study that shows how cities around the world are preparing themselves for the future through apartment design and public transportation. When I returned this weekend, I saw a fascinating show on Nigerian art from private French collections, rarely seen by the public. The 187 objects from 44 various ethnic groups in Nigeria included a series of large masks created from, among other things, the human skull, facial hair, antelope horns, and lion’s teeth. I especially enjoyed the films of anthropologist Arnold Rubin from the 1960s that showed remote Nigerian tribesmen dancing with several of the masks and costumes on display. Another worthwhile exhibition at the Museum showcased New Zealand’s Maori culture and featured large wooden carvings from ancestral meeting houses. 

 
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Thoreau’s Maine Woods, A New Exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s “The Maine Woods,” the Harvard Museum of Natural History is showcasing the works of photographer Scot Miller. Miller has traversed the state of Maine for seven years retracing Thoreau’s epic exploration. The exhibition, on view through September 1, 2014, will also feature a snowshoe made for Thoreau by the Penobscot Indians and a beautiful new illustrated edition of Thoreau’s book. As an outdoors writer based in New England, I’ve also spent a good deal of time following in Thoreau’s footsteps. You can see my story in Sierra Magazine on paddling a similar route Thoreau used while writing “The Maine Woods.”

(Photograph by Scot Miller, courtesy of the Harvard Museum of Natural History) 

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Art From Maine’s Top Museums On Display at Portland Museum of Art

The rugged and raw beauty of Maine has been a lure to many of America’s foremost landscape artists. Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, first visited Mount Desert Island in 1844. When he returned home to New York with a bounty of canvases, Cole’s affluent patrons were astounded by the mix of mountains and sea. Man versus the chaotic forces of nature, particularly fishermen struggling against powerful nor’easters, kept Winslow Homer busy on the boulder-strewn shores of Prouts Neck for more than two decades. In the 1920s, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and other early American abstractionists from Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery joined John Marin to work at his summer cottage in Deer Isle. 

 
This summer, the Portland Museum of Art is taking full advantage of this bevy of work to present Directors’ Cut: Selections from the Maine Art Museum Trail that includes signature pieces from Maine’s most-renowned art museums. On view from May 21 through September 20, the show will bring the best art Maine has to offer together for the first time. All of these museums are part of the Maine Art Museum Trail. To celebrate the exhibition and the route, Summer Feet Cycling, who I biked with on my 50th birthday, will present a weeklong ride along the coast that visits all 8 museums on the Maine Art Trail. This includes stops at Homer’s former art studio in Prouts Neck, a visit to Andrew Wyeth’s Olson House in Port Clyde, and a requisite day on Monhegan Island, where Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, and Rockwell Kent all painted the island’s cliffs, meadows, and quaint fishing communities. The dates are June 21-27 and September 6-12. Cost is $2595 per person, including lodging, bike rental, guides, van support, museum admission, and most meals.
 
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A Must-Stop at the East Side Gallery in Berlin

Guest Post and Photo by Amy Perry Basseches

Another of my main areas of interest when I was in Berlin in January was to experience first-hand the “East divided from West” Years. The separation of Berlin began in 1945, and, in 1961, East Germany built the Berlin Wall, circling West Berlin, to prevent its residents from migrating. My husband Josh and I landed at Schoenefeld Airport (the airport in the former Soviet quarter of East Berlin and formerly the main airport of East Germany), and thus began this aspect of the adventure. 
 
In my two days of touring, we criss-crossed Berlin constantly, from what was West Berlin to what was East Berlin, without distinction. There are certainly many memorials to a city divided, and to understanding that history, but none as interesting to me as the East Side Gallery. Once it was the Berlin Wall. Now it’s the longest open-air gallery in the world. Almost a mile long, one section of the Berlin Wall was not demolished and instead became a living canvas for paintings about change, happiness, hope, and freedom Beginning in 1990, 118 artists from 21 countries painted pictures on the wall. They are vibrant, interesting, and, frankly genuine (this is all outside, not hidden from the weather). I would have loved to stop and photograph each one. In fact, I bought a book of Wall paintings to bring home. Of course “progress” is always a challenge: a section of the East Side Gallery was removed a few years ago to make room for luxury condos along the River Spree. 
 
There are many other areas of Berlin which I visited related to the “East divided from West” Years, including: the Berlin Wall Memorial (with tunnels underneath marked); the gigantic Soviet War Memorial for the 22,000 who died taking Berlin in WWII; the TV Tower (famously built VERY tall, tallest in Germany, by the East Germans, intended as a symbol of communist power); and Checkpoint Charlie, which was silly and not even in the right place (one of the actors playing a soldier was a Syrian refugee, and the other had a second job at Chippendale’s). 
 
If Berlin (or Germany in general) interests you, let ActiveTravels assist with your journey.
 

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