Trains aren’t currently running across the border to Canada so the only no-fly option was by Greyhound, penance for 7 days of Cunard luxury. This one seemed ready for the knackers yard..

We had 2 days to wander round Old Montreal, the old port area of the city located along the St Lawrence river. Since the 1960s the area has received significant investment and is now the location of top class restaurants, family oriented entertainment and yet still retains much of historical interest. We also saw our first Chimney Swifts, feeding above the hotel rooftop bar.

Atlas Obscura is an app that highlights different things to see across the world. Montreal had an interesting entry called Habitat 67 an architectural oddity built in 1967 that boasts the most expensive real estate in the city. A cube can cost upwards of 600,000CD for a 1 bedroomed monstrosity.

Soon it was time to move on, our sleeper train awaited to take us overnight from the sophisticated metropolis of Montreal, to Moncton, a nondescript town in New Brunswick.

Where we picked up our transport for the next 31 days, not exactly the Mustang requested

The Bay of Fundy is the body of water lying between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia blessed with 3 tourist-friendly attributes; the highest tidal range of anywhere on the planet, fantastic whale-watching and a national park solely devoted to the wide variety of fossils found in the area. We drove down the coastline towards St John, visiting the Fundy National Park.

Although we assume Canada is blessed with huge areas of virgin forest, this is far from the truth and the park was created to protect a large area of forest which had already been cut at least twice, perhaps even 3 times since settlers arrived from Europe and USA. The trees were cut and then shipped from small bays along the Bay of Fundy, the huge amounts of sawdust produced killed off the salmon and other fish and destroyed the fisheries. Even today, with full protection, the salmon fishery has never recovered. As the age of trees in the national park increases the diversity of birds and mammals is slowly increasing. Before moving on we stayed overnight in St John, a town not listed as a tourist-friendly attraction….next stop Nova Scotia!