White Bus Black Dog

Travelling on vegetable grease is a lot slower than traveling with diesel. You have to gather it, filter it, and fill up your tank by hand. You have clean up after yourself after each of these steps. Dogs, also, add time to a trip. They need to go outside to pee, prance, poop and chew grass once in a while. They get antsy. Sometimes, we combine the dog and grease chores. Somewhere near Moncton, NB., we parked on the side of the road to do just this.

While pouring vegetable grease from a bucket into our red secondary tank, we noticed cars driving slowly by, stopping at a certain point in the road, and rolling backwards towards us again. We looked quizzically at them as they passed, first going one way, then the other (I’m sure they wondered about us, too).

Turned out, we had accidentally parked at the top of New Brunswick’s Magnetic Hill, one of the top three natural destinations in Canada. We gathered our pups, drove to the end of the road, stopped at the white post as directed, put ourselves in neutral and ROLLED UPHILL (apparently). Pretty neat, said Paul, who was driving at the time. But the Magnetic Hill attractions do not end there. It isn’t just a muddy road with a definite lack of signage. Past the entrance to the “natural phenomena”, there are gift shops, artificial ponds and a covered bridge. And the words “tourist trap” are taken literally: the maze of one-way streets only leads deeper into the manufactured landscape. Roads lined with magnet monuments weave you through an endless variety of quaint wooden houses selling trinkets, caged animals waiting for a sunny day, and signs that point you back to the beginning of it all. We were lost. But we got out! Don’t go there, it is awful.

We hope to make it to Quebec City by tonight.

As per request, haircut photos:

We are posting these blogs from the Acorn Restaurant, in New Brunswick. Come for the large parking lot, stay for the shower stalls, $1.89 bottomless coffees and wireless internet.