A Day Trip to Sackville

When you live on an island, sometimes, in the dead of winter, you need to GET OFF THE ISLAND. It doesn’t really matter where. Just OFF.

So today, with a rare day free from other commitments, Lisa and I took a day trip to Sackville, New Brunswick, the place that’s close enough to us that both qualifies as being off the Island, and “someplace.”

It was a lovely day trip.

We had lunch at Ducks aren’t Real (née The Black Duck), a restaurant I’ve visited many times that has never looked better, with a delightful new solarium at the back (with promise of a garden patio in the summer), a broader menu, and everything grounded in the solid performance that the space has always brought.

After lunch we went up the hill to Mount Allison University. We took a swing through the chapel—one of my favourite sacred spaces.

Next we walked next door and toured the Owens Art Gallery. The gallery highlight was the exhibition Hidden Blackness: Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901):

Hidden Blackness is the first major exhibition of Edward Mitchell Bannister’s work ever presented in Canada—124 years after the artist’s death. Born in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, Bannister was a self-taught, nineteenth-century, African American/Canadian painter of the Barbizon school known for pastoral landscapes and seascapes.

My favourite of Bannister’s works was River Scene (which can only really be done justice to when standing in front of it in the flesh):

Edward Mitchell Bannister, River Scene, 1885
Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax.
Photograph by RAW Photography.

From the gallery we walked across campus to the Purdy Crawford Centre for the Arts, where the collegial and generous Erik Edson had agreed to give us an impromptu tour of the printmaking shops with very late notice. What a wonder: the building is interesting and spacious, the printmaking shop well-equipped and, a salve for for we basement printmaking dwellers, filled with light:

There’s a tiny letterpress shop shoehorned into a hallway, with a generous collection of type:

We said goodbye to Erik just as his 3:00 p.m. printmaking students started to arrive. 

Erik suggested we stop by the Mount Allison bookstore on our way off campus, as they sell paper that might be attractive to us. He was right. They sell 50 inch Legion Stonehenge paper, well-suited for printmaking, for $4.99 a foot. We bought a 15 foot long strip:

Paper in hand, we made a beeline for the car, as we needed to charge it before heading home.

We found a level 3 EV charger in front of the Visitor Information Centre, and were very happy to find that inside there was Café Tintamarre, a new venture from the couple who operate the Deus Ex Macina coffee truck at the Sackville Farmers Market (where Olivia and I had very good coffee back in 2023).

We left Sackville at 4:15, charged again (winter battery life!) in Borden-Carleton, and pulled into the driveway at home at exactly 6:00.

We left the Island. It was much fun: new things! new people! new ideas!