An unexpected day at St John New Brunswick

We stayed at the Ellsworth Walmart for part of the day finishing up the solar. (Ian will do a post soon about it) and drove up to the border and crossed in Calais, Maine. I must say this was perhaps the nicest and easiest crossing ever. The Border guard was very friendly, asked us the basic questions and sent us on our way but before letting us go asked if we needed directions to our destination!!!  We said we were fine and continued on towards St John. It was getting late and we found an old weigh station along Hwy 1 in New Brunswick and pulled over for the night. It was a bit off of the highway and was pretty quiet. Traffic went by but it wasn't bad. No trucks pulled in to run their rigs all night to disturb us so that was nice.



This paved area is the old weigh station, the highway is way off to the right.

  We woke and headed straight to St John to take Aayla to the walk in clinic to have the tick head removed and get antibiotics. This was quite the experience!

I will never complain about our healthcare system in BC ever again. I am not sure how anything gets done in New Brunswick. We stopped at the first Medical center we saw and were told they couldn't help us, but we could go into town to this other clinic. So we left and drove into town to the walk in clinic...

However you can not go to a walk in clinic here without an appointment??? In BC we walk in, no appointment, wait sometimes an hour or more, but you see a doctor. Here, you have to call a number, get an appointment and then go to the walk in clinic??? Does that make sense to you? Apparently walk in clinics here are for people who don't have family doctors, you just need to see a doctor. This clinic said our only choice since we were passing through was to go to the emergency room at the hospital...the emergency room for a tick...

So we went to St Joseph's Hospital

and waited ....no can you guess how long???

We waited seven yes that was 7 HOURS to see the doctor. We had decided not to go to a clinic in the States; we have travel insurance but thought it would be easier to go in Canada then to call and find out which clinic our insurance would accept, pay, get reimbursed etc...if we knew it was going to take us a trip to the emergency room and a 7 hour wait we would have just gone in the States! Never will I talk bad about out BC system again. The emergency room took 7 hours because we were in line with colds, flus, people needing perscription refills etc etc... not an emergency to be seen anywhere! to top it off...the tick head was gone! Her body rejected it and pushed it out...but we did get antibiotics so not a total waste of 7 hours!

We finally were able to leave the hospital and after stopping at Costco and Home Depot we decided to just call it a night and stay at the St John Walmart (our parking space closer to Future shop but we were parked at Walmart)

See the two rigs directly behind us? 2 nights ago they were at Ellsworth with us...
small world :)

We were going to continue on to Moncton but I saw a Value Village which might not excite most of you but I am not a big shopper. No closet full of purses and shoes and clothes and jewelry for me. In fact I generally hate shopping now and rarely buy anything but I am a treasure hunter and had to go get my treasure hunting fix. I haven't seen a Value Village in over 2 months. The girls got a couple little new toys, and a couple dresses, I got a sweater (starting to miss that Florida heat now) and we managed to walk around in there for almost 2 hours while Ian walked around Future Shop and he managed not to buy anything! An easy way to pass time for us all! Tomorrow we head to PEI.

Our internet stick is only for US coverage so my posts may be a little sporatic now as we wait for wifi spots to make posts but we turned on the iphone again while in Canada so we can access email and make necesssary phone calls without our internet and magic jack. Tonight we lucked out with the wifi...coming up in the Canada day post :)