A Weekend in Saint Andrews-by-the-Sea, NB: 12 Stops - 1000 Towns of Canada
Weekend Blueprints
A Weekend in Saint Andrews: by-the-Sea, New Brunswick
Bay of Fundy whale watching, Canada's grand old seaside resort, an island reached by driving across the ocean floor, and one of the country's most beautiful gardens — a two-day New Brunswick escape.
Created by Sarah Finkle, Dalhousie University
- 📍 Saint Andrews (downtown + Kingsbrae + Algonquin) → Ministers Island → Bay of Fundy whale watching → Katy's Cove → back to Saint Andrews
- 📅 2 days · one night at The Algonquin Resort
- 🚗 About 20 km of local driving across two days · Day 1 is under 4 km and nearly all of it on foot
- 🏘️ 12 stops
- 🌊 Best time: 16 May to 17 October, when Kingsbrae and Ministers Island are both open — but the whales do not arrive until mid-June, and the island's hours change with the tide every day
Saint Andrews-by-the-Sea is one of Canada’s oldest seaside resort towns. It sits at the mouth of the St. Croix River on Passamaquoddy Bay, three hours west of Halifax and one hour southeast of the Maine border.
Loyalists founded the town in 1783, laying it out on a proper grid and giving many of the streets British royal names — the Hanoverian kings, the Queen, the Prince, the Regent. The waterfront is still a working fishing harbour. The heritage streets are still walkable end-to-end. And the town is still, above all else, what it has been since the summer of 1889, when the Algonquin first opened its doors, a summer place.
Day 1 stays in town. Breakfast on Water Street, a long morning at Kingsbrae Garden (27 acres, 50,000-odd perennials and a pair of alpacas), lunch on the harbour deck at The Gables, an afternoon walking Water Street and the wharf, then up the hill to the Algonquin for the night and dinner at Braxton’s.
Day 2 goes out on the water and across it: breakfast back at Kingsbrae, the drive over the ocean floor to Ministers Island, a Zodiac out into the Bay of Fundy, a late lunch on the waterfront, a walk at Katy’s Cove, and dinner in an 1820 chandler’s house on Water Street.
Book the Algonquin at least a month ahead for July and August weekends. Check the Ministers Island crossing hours before you drive — the operator publishes them a day at a time, because they move with the tide, and admissions stop an hour before the island closes. And if you are coming for whales, come after mid-June: the boats run from May, but the whales do not.
Day 1 — Saint Andrews town
→ under 4 km, and almost none of it in the car · Water Street, Kingsbrae, the wharf and the Algonquin
Start on Water Street. There is free parking behind the shops on Church Lane and along the front; Honeybeans is at number 180.
1☕ Breakfast
Breakfast at Honeybeans Coffee, Tea & Treats
★ 5.0·Honeybeans Coffee, Tea & Treats, 180 Water Street, Saint Andrews, NB
Start on Water Street, at number 180, with locally roasted coffee, fresh pastries and a proper breakfast. Honeybeans is the town's morning room — small, busy, and four doors from everything you will do today. It runs 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., though Tuesday hours are not published, so if you are here on a Tuesday, telephone first. Everything on Day 1 is within a ten-minute walk of this door.
🚶 900 m · a 12-minute walk up Water Street and King Street — or 2 minutes in the car, with parking at the garden gate
2Garden · Nature · Anchor
Kingsbrae Garden
★ 5.0·Kingsbrae Garden, 220 King Street, Saint Andrews, NB E5B 1Y8
One of Canada's great public gardens and the reason many people come: 27 acres, some 50,000 perennials laid out in themed rooms — White, Knot, Bird & Butterfly — with a cedar maze, a working Dutch windmill, sculpture across the grounds and, yes, alpacas. The 2026 season is 16 May to 17 October, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Admission is $20 an adult in the shoulder season and $23 from mid-June to mid-September, family $54 / $59, plus HST. Give it two to three hours; you are coming back tomorrow for breakfast anyway.
🚶 1 km · 12 minutes back down King Street to the harbour end of Water Street
3🥪 Lunch
Lunch at The Gables Restaurant
★ 5.0·The Gables Restaurant, 143 Water Street, Saint Andrews, NB
Fresh Atlantic seafood on a deck built out over Passamaquoddy Bay — lobster, scallops, chowder, and the best table in town for watching the tide come in. The Gables has been a Saint Andrews institution for decades and runs 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. Note for later: it is 100 m from The Chandler Room at Stop 12 — 143 and 129 Water Street. This street does most of the work in this guide.
🚶 400 m · 5 minutes — walk the shops down to the wharf; the whole street is four blocks
4Shopping · Heritage · Waterfront · Photo Spot
Water Street & the town wharf
★ 5.0·Water Street & the town wharf, Saint Andrews, NB
Walk Water Street end to end — it is four blocks and takes as long as you let it. Galleries, a chocolate maker, a whale shop, two mural walls, a hardware store that has been there longer than the murals, and the block-by-block heritage architecture that got the whole downtown designated. Finish at the town wharf at the bottom of King Street, which is where tomorrow's Zodiac leaves from. Sunbury Shores Arts & Nature Centre is at 139 Water Street and the Ross Memorial Museum, an Edwardian house museum, is free. Give it two hours.
1.4 km · 3 min up King Street and Prince of Wales Street to the top of the hill
5🛏️ Overnight
Check in at The Algonquin Resort
★ 5.0·The Algonquin Resort, 184 Adolphus Street, Saint Andrews, NB E5B 1T7
The Algonquin has stood at the top of the town since June 1889, when the St. Andrews Land Company — founded in 1883 by American businessmen — opened a huge wooden Shingle Style hotel here. One thing worth knowing as you walk in: that building is gone. It burned in 1914, and what you check into is its replacement, a four-storey Tudor Revival block in concrete by Barott, Blackadder & Webster of Montreal — the faux half-timbering and the red slate roof that everyone photographs. 235 rooms, a spa, a pool and a golf course on the hill below.
🚶 On site — Braxton's is off the Algonquin's main hall on the Adolphus Street side
6🍷 Dinner
Dinner at Braxton's Restaurant & Bar
★ 5.0·Braxton's, The Algonquin Resort, 184 Adolphus Street, Saint Andrews, NB
Braxton's is the Algonquin's steakhouse-and-seafood room, and it is named for Chef George Braxton, an African-American cook born in Virginia in the mid-nineteenth century who trained at Wellesley College in Massachusetts between 1883 and 1886 and then came to run the kitchens here. He went on to publish a cookbook that is thought to be possibly the earliest Black publication in Canada. Ask for the history; the resort tells it well. The Right Whale Pub downstairs is the same kitchen at half the price.
Day 2 — Bay of Fundy
→ about 16 km · the ocean-floor causeway to Ministers Island, a Zodiac on the Bay of Fundy, a waterfront lunch, Katy's Cove and an 1820 dining room
600 m · 2 min back down to the Kingsbrae gate · you do not need garden admission to eat here
7☕ Breakfast
Breakfast at The Garden Café — Kingsbrae
★ 5.0·Savour in the Garden / The Garden Café, Kingsbrae Garden, 220 King Street, Saint Andrews, NB
Back to Kingsbrae, and this is the thing the brochures bury: you do not need garden admission to eat at the restaurants or visit the gift shop. Savour in the Garden and The Garden Café sit at the gate — coffee, pastries, breakfast sandwiches and a view straight down the lawns to Passamaquoddy Bay — and you can walk in, eat, and leave without paying the $20. Do not dawdle if the tide is against you: Stop 8 runs on a clock you do not control.
3.6 km · 8 min to the end of Bar Road, then about a kilometre across the gravel bar and up to the house — 6 km and 14 min all in. CHECK THE DAY'S CROSSING HOURS FIRST
8Heritage · National Historic Site · Anchor
Ministers Island National Historic Site
★ 5.0·Covenhoven, Ministers Island, via Bar Road, Saint Andrews, NB
You drive across the ocean floor to get here. At low tide a wide gravel bar carries a road out to a 490-acre island; at high tide the bar is under water and the island is cut off. Sir William Van Horne — the CPR's general manager and later its president, the man who drove the first transcontinental railway through — bought it in 1891 and spent the next decade building Covenhoven, a 50-room summer house by the Montreal architect Edward Maxwell, along with a chateau-style barn of 1898 for Clydesdales and Dutch Belted cattle and a round stone bathhouse with a tidal swimming pool cut into the rock. The Province of New Brunswick has owned it since the early 1980s; the Van Horne Estate charity has run it since 2006, and Parks Canada designated the whole estate a National Historic Site on 22 September 1997. The season is 16 May to 18 October 2026, and the daily open hours are set by the tide and change every day — read them on the island's own site before you set off, and note that admissions stop one hour before closing so that everyone gets off. Allow two to three hours.
6.1 km · 13 min back over the bar and into town to the wharf
9Adventure · Wildlife · Bay of Fundy · Anchor
Fundy Tide Runners — Whale Watching
★ 5.0·Fundy Tide Runners, 16 King Street, Saint Andrews, NB E5B 1Y2
Two hours in a Zodiac on the Bay of Fundy — low, fast and close to the water, which is the point. Humpback, finback and minke whales, harbour porpoise, seals and bald eagles, and Mustang flotation suits supplied because it is cold out there whatever the calendar says. $105 an adult, $85 for ages 5 to 12. The operator runs May to October, but read their own line carefully before you book: "whales are migratory so we must wait for them to arrive in mid-June." From mid-June on they put sightings at 95 to 100 per cent; in May you are buying a boat ride. Departures are from 16 King Street at the wharf.
🚶 100 m · 1 minute along King Street
10🥪 Lunch
Late lunch at Seasons By The Sea Bistro
★ 5.0·Seasons By The Sea Bistro, 209 Water Street, Saint Andrews, NB
A well-earned late lunch after the boat. Seasons By The Sea is a waterfront bistro at 209 Water Street — not 221, whatever the listings say — with a big harbour-facing patio, seafood, fish and chips, burgers and local beer. It is 100 m from where the Zodiac ties up. Watch the fishing boats and let the adrenaline wear off.
1.8 km · 4 min north on Prince of Wales Street and Acadia Road
11Beach · Nature · Free · Photo Spot
Katy's Cove Beach
★ 5.0·Katy's Cove, Cove Street, Saint Andrews, NB E5B 2L3
A sheltered saltwater cove on the north side of town, warm because it fills and empties with the tide over sun-warmed flats, with a paved trail running round two sides and free admission. Be clear about what it is right now, though: Katy's Cove was for generations a supervised swimming place with a canteen and rafts, and the town's own page says "Katy's Cove Inc. is now working towards the refurbishment of Katy's Cove" and is asking for community support to bring it back. So come for the walk and the view across Passamaquoddy Bay, not for a staffed beach. Park on Cove Street.
1.7 km · 4 min back down Cove Street and Champlain Avenue to Water Street
12🍷 Dinner
Dinner at The Chandler Room — Treadwell Inn
★ 5.0·The Chandler Room, Treadwell Inn, 129 Water Street, Saint Andrews, NB
Finish 100 m from where you had lunch on Day 1. The Chandler Room is inside the Treadwell Inn at 129 Water Street, a building put up around 1820 by the ships' chandler John Treadwell — hence the name — who supplied the sailing vessels working out of this harbour. Christy and A.J. Kennedy own and run both the inn and the restaurant, and Kennedy House down the street as well. Small room, short menu, book ahead in summer.
Good to know
When to go — and why mid-June is the real start
Three calendars govern this weekend and only one of them is in the brochures. Kingsbrae Garden runs 16 May to 17 October, 9 to 6 daily. Ministers Island runs 16 May to 18 October. But Fundy Tide Runners, who sell tickets from May, say plainly that “whales are migratory so we must wait for them to arrive in mid-June” — after which they put sightings at 95 to 100 per cent. So a late-May trip gets you the garden, the island and a fast cold boat ride, and not much else. Mid-June to mid-September is the full weekend; September is the best of it, with the crowds gone and the water at its warmest.
Tide watch — Ministers Island
The island is reached by driving across a natural gravel bar, and the bar is under the Bay of Fundy for most of the day. Do not use a rule of thumb. The island publishes daily Open Hours that move with the tide, and they are the only number that matters — read them on ministersisland.net the morning you go, or telephone 506-529-5081.
Two things the itinerary depends on: admissions stop one hour before the island closes, so a late arrival is a wasted drive; and the crossing hours can fall anywhere in the day, which means Day 2’s whole running order may need turning around. If the low tide is in the afternoon, do the whale boat first and the island after lunch.
Where to stay
The Algonquin Resort is the weekend’s anchor — 235 rooms, spa, pool, golf on the hill below, Braxton’s for dinner, and a ten-minute walk down to Water Street. Worth knowing what you are looking at: the 1889 hotel burned in 1914, and the Tudor Revival building you check into is its 1915 concrete replacement.
Downtown alternatives, all on or beside Water Street: the Treadwell Inn (c.1820, and Stop 12’s dining room is in it), Kennedy House and Windsor House. Book a month ahead for July and August.
Total driving
About 20 km across the whole weekend, and that is the point of coming here. Day 1 is under 4 km and every leg of it is a walk: Honeybeans to Kingsbrae is 900 m, Kingsbrae back to The Gables is 1 km, the whole of Water Street is four blocks, and only the run up to the Algonquin (1.4 km) really wants a car. Day 2 is about 16 km, almost all of it the two trips out to Ministers Island — 3.6 km to the end of Bar Road, then about a kilometre across the bar and up to the house. Park once on Water Street on Day 1 and leave the car there.
Fuel & food
Fuel and groceries are in town; anything bigger is in St. Stephen, 30 minutes west. Meal times that matter: Honeybeans 7:30 to 5 (Tuesday hours unpublished — call), The Gables 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, Kingsbrae’s restaurants inside garden hours but with no garden admission required, Braxton’s and the Right Whale Pub at the resort, and The Chandler Room at the Treadwell. Stops 3 and 12 are 100 m apart at 143 and 129 Water Street, and Stops 9 and 10 are 100 m apart on King Street — this is a very small town.
People worth knowing
Sir William Van Horne (1843–1915) — general manager and later president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the American-born executive who drove Canada’s first transcontinental line through. He bought Ministers Island in 1891 and spent a decade building Covenhoven, a fifty-room summer house by the Montreal architect Edward Maxwell, with an 1898 chateau-style barn for Clydesdales and Dutch Belted cattle and a round stone bathhouse cut with a tidal pool.
Chef George Braxton — born in Virginia in the mid-nineteenth century, trained at Wellesley College from 1883 to 1886, then ran the Algonquin’s kitchens, and published a cookbook thought to be possibly the earliest Black publication in Canada. Braxton’s is named for him.
John Treadwell — the ships’ chandler who built the c.1820 house at 129 Water Street that is now the Treadwell Inn, and gives The Chandler Room its name. Christy and A.J. Kennedy — the innkeepers who run the Treadwell, The Chandler Room and Kennedy House today.
Katy’s Cove — what it is now
For generations Katy’s Cove was a supervised saltwater swimming place with a canteen, rafts and change houses, and plenty of guidebooks still describe it that way. The Town of Saint Andrews’ own page now says “Katy’s Cove Inc. is now working towards the refurbishment of Katy’s Cove” and that they will be asking for community support to bring it back. What is there today: a warm, sheltered saltwater cove, free admission, and a paved trail round two sides of it. A lovely last walk; not a staffed beach. Park on Cove Street.
Extending the trip
A Bay of Fundy Weekend — our own two-day guide runs Moncton to Saint Andrews and ends where this one starts; run them back to back for four days. Campobello Island — Franklin D. Roosevelt’s summer home, reached by ferry via Deer Island; a full day. St. Stephen — 30 minutes west, and the Ganong Chocolate Museum. Beaches, Waterfalls & Hiking — our southern New Brunswick guide picks up the same coast eastward, with five waterfalls and New River Beach.