NEW BRUNSWICK: Just past Maine, time slows down and the tides speed up.

It takes about a day to figure out what is wrong with New Brunswick, the sleepy Canadian province that sits atop Maine like a bushy toupee. The highways are wide and kempt -- and as empty as a newborn interstate. The towns are clapboard and compact, full of charm and as of yet free of the litter of corporate signage that clutters American business strips. The locals are pleasant and welcoming to the point -- you begin to worry -- of naivete.

It all seems perfect. But something is off. It's too colorful. Clearly, New Brunswick should be in black and white. This is the Fred MacMurray of provinces, the Saturday matinee of destinations. New Brunswick is an hour ahead of Washington, D.C., but it's more important to adjust your calendar than your watch. At the beep, the time will be 1959.

My family and I cross from Calais, Maine, into New Brunswick on a bright August morning and promptly shed about five decades. After two days of East Coast backups to get here, the lightly peopled Canadian side of the St. Croix River makes even Maine seem like a teeming metroplex. There's a mere cul-de-sac's worth of traffic along the main route northeast, Highway 1, which is leafy with prime Acadian forests to the west and tapers eastward down to the rocky Atlantic Coast.

Tipped to the dreamy driving, we have made this our bomber road trip of the summer. It's a weeklong, 2,000-mile odyssey that will take us from an island full of working fishing villages to the maritime spectacle of the Bay of Fundy's biggest-in-the-world tides to the cultural oddity of St. Andrews, a comely resort town founded by reverse refugees from the United States in the 18th century.

In the Shadow of the Lighthouse

Driving from D.C. is insane, of course. But our only regret so far is that the retro setting means the four of us -- a dad, a mom, two girls of car-seat age and 1,000 hours of "American Girl" audio books -- might feel more appropriate in a colossal station wagon with chrome bumpers than in our increasingly microscopic Honda sedan. On the ferry out to Grand Manan Island, though, our little Accord fits neatly on the car deck between seafood trucks and trailers stacked with sea kayaks.

Grand Manan -- our first stop -- is the largest of the islands strung across the entrance to the Bay of Fundy. It's 16 miles long and home to about 1,000 year-round fisherfamilies. In the summer, the ferries from Blacks Harbour fill with bird watchers and tourists -- largely from Toronto and Montreal -- and Grand Manan temporarily converts into an isolated vacation retreat and an open-air museum of coastal culture. We pass a misty brown smudge on the southern horizon and Dave MacKinnon, an off-season lobsterman leaning over the ferry rail, identifies it as Campobello, the Fundy island where Franklin Roosevelt kept a summer home. Later, he points out three dolphin running along the ferry's bow wave.

"Keep lookin'," MacKinnon says with curt kindness to the girls. He's a short-haired man in a blue windbreaker, with a face pickled by sea air and Yankee reticence. "There's been right whales around this year. They must've had a lot of babies born in Florida last spring."

After about 90 minutes, we pull around the northern tip of Grand Manan under the lee of a looming cliff. At its top is an Edward Hopper-ready lighthouse, gleaming white in the cloudless afternoon. It's a towering octagonal cone, whitewashed clapboard with a bright red cap, strapped to the island rock with cables against the shrieking Atlantic gales. The keeper's house, set back along the grassy bluff, is a dramatic B&B flanked by steep cliffs and infinite views.

We head south along the east shore to Seal Cove, the heart of Grand Manan's fishing industry. On the ocean side of the coastal road, we pass small harbors with boats aground in the low tide. On the inland side, there are broad meadows speckled with wildflowers. Beyond them, we can just see the rise of the forested cliffs we will explore by foot in coming days.

Tourist businesses are few, except for a cluster of museums, kayak outfitters and gift shops near the ferry terminal and the many modest frame homes doing seasonal duty as guest houses. There is a tiny IGA grocery store, with a vintage silver motor home built into its side that is open for business as a drive-up clam house. We would come to discover some inventive and upscale restaurants on Grand Manan, but now these fried clams and scallops on wax paper are perfect.

At Seal Cove, we found an art director's dream of a New England shantytown tucked into a deep notch of shoreline. Twin church steeples rise above the helter-skelter of sardine sheds, dock houses and, just offshore, the tilted, net-draped pilings of the herring pens. A whole compound of weathered and dignified smokehouses have been restored -- by a New York artist, no less -- into a delightful museum of the sardine industry. The tufts of demonstration smoke, mixed with the salt breeze, tendrils of fog and rich seaweed decay from the tideline, make for a sort of dockside aromatherapy, a sweet and soothing briny incense that we savor for an hour before walking back to our cottage.

On the advice of Tammy Brown, our innkeeper at Beach Front Cottages, we gather periwinkles along the way to be steamed and consumed with butter on the porch of our cabin overlooking the water. We eat the unlikely shellfish dinner and listen to the artillery boom of the tide up and down the shore. The lights of Seal Cove twinkle on, and we congratulate ourselves for being on this spot at this moment.