Tour De Fredericton

A second day of schooling to do. Dad was unimpressed because we only sat down for breakfast at 8:45am, but, then again, he was the one who decided to make fancy eggs (don’t tell him I said that). After we ate, I went outside to try and do some work. I waster a lot of time trying to find the name of my math textbook on the bloody teacher aid website we’re using for our homeschooling. I don’t feel as though it’s very user friendly or very organized. I started a paper for social studies on the history of Canada and the confederation. Dad didn’t really give any specifics, so I started at the beginning and decided to finish with the introduction of Nunavut to our country in 2000. At around 11:00am, Mum made some lunch and we got ready to bike into town again. We didn’t leave very fast because Isaac wanted to play some lacrosse with Dad, so Mum and I read. Then we got our bikes out and biked the 6kms to Queens St. We ate lunch as soon as we got there and then walked up and down the street window shopping. At 2:30, after we checked out a bookstore, we walked across the street to City Hall and took the walking tour of the town. A lot of the buildings had burned down once or more, except for the wooden one that was a storehouse for ammo of course. The square where the City Hall stands is called phoenix square because the building that stands there is the fourth, built in the 1870s. Before that there was an opera house, a liquor store with a temperance society on top and I can’t remember what the other thing was. Our tour guide, Lucas, told us about the local, Lord Beaverbrook. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He was a bit of a bag. I mean, he was a fantastic businessman and owned half the concrete in Canada by the time he was 20, was friends with Winston Churchill and bought up five big newspaper companies in England, but he also made schoolchildren pay for a statue of himself that he commissioned and refused to pay for with his millions and named all the buildings he built in Fredericton after himself. There were so many that the town actually asked him to stop because it was getting confusing. There is a theatre in town named after Lady Beaverbrook across the street from the Lord Beaverbrook hotel. The roof of the theatre is

painted in multi-coloured ribbons but used to be blank white. The town said that they did this to make it look like ribbons wrapped around a present, because the building was a gift from Beaverbrook to his wife but that’s not the real story. In the ‘70s there was a bachelor party in one of the higher rooms in the Lord Beaverbrook hotel and the guys had three things: alcohol, a projector and some choice films. They got bored of their little TV and lo and behold there was a giant white screen across the the street. There was a play going on that night as well, so when it let out all the families and the kids turned around to look at their parents like, “Wow that was so good!” they saw some not children friendly things projected on the white screen above. Thus, multi-coloured ribbons. We walked past the soldiers barracks. Apparently it used to be 20 men per tiny room plus a few wives and kids. Then there was the officers quarter which were twice the size and housed 20 men plus wives and kids in total throughout the entire building. Interesting. The last bit of our tour took us past some historical houses, including one that had been worked on by 6 different architects, has curved windows which weren’t available anywhere in the Americas at the time the house was built and literally pushed another house out of the way so the buyer could be on the corner of the street. Pretty house though and it’s still a residence. We ended up at a Neo-Gothic cathedral. Apparently the guy whose idea it was built it because he thought everyone should have the right to go to church, but you had to be a city to have a church with a population of 10000. The population of Fredericton was 4000 then, so he bombarded Queen Victoria with letters asking her to make an exception. Eventually, she relented, but he ended up not having enough money to build a roof or a steeple. The guy, who was a priest I think, spent the whole night praying and in the morning found an envelope outside the door with just enough money to finish with a wooden roof and steeple. The architect who designed it was so disgusted with this replacement for a steel roof and stone steeple moved across the town so he wouldn’t have to look at it. Eventually it was finished properly, but after the priest had died. It’s a very nice building now. After out tour we walked back into town. The boys went to get haircuts and Mum and I went back to that bookstore. I bought three new books. Then we walked across the street to a café and I had a New Brunswick fog which is a London fog with a twist and a lemon poppyseed macaroon which was delicious. The boys met us there and had a snack and then we were on our way back to the campsite. The parents went to the store so I bought some music (finally!) and did some blogging. After dinner I drove all the way to the mall in town to buy a postcard. It was little stressful, I’ve never driven faster than 50 before and the speed limit was 90 at one point, but I only went up to 80 and the guy behind me wasn’t all that impatient, thank the gods. Back to the campsite, it was time for bed. Peace out m8s.

#camping #newbrunswick #fredericton