Leaving Halifax, we began our tour of the western lobe of Nova Scotia, heading clockwise along the Atlantic Coast and back up to the Bay of Fundy.
Rain followed along the way, but never made us miserable. Internet connectivity was often spotty. So the combination of weather and access required us to pull Prufrock into some small towns early in the morning, find a good parking place, and do our work as rain splattered on the roof and waves rolled in out the window.
We fell into a rhythm that made the week memorable. We did not unhitch for days in a row. We were pulling our home office/bedroom/kitchen/bathroom with us the whole time – and looked for the best places to plunk her.
Lunenberg – Monday Aug. 5: This town was billed to us as a must-see UNESCO site. It’s claim is that it is the oldest example of British town planning in the hemisphere. The original 18th century wood-plank buildings are brightly painted, and create quite a scene looking across the bay. We found a lunch spot, then ran through town and out to a golf course. We stopped to chat with a nice New Brunswick fellow who explained a bit of Canadian politics to us.
Leaving Lunenberg, we drove about 45 minutes to Rissers Beach for our park parking spot overnight. It was remote and beautiful, but it rained most of the night, and there was no Internet signal, so we had to be on the move early, and had minimal exploration time.
Liverpool – Tuesday Aug. 6: We parked along the water for a morning’s worth of work in the rain, then really needed to dry out. So we headed to a laundromat, then drove on to our night’s stop – a Harvest Host location called Tusket Falls Brewing, located in a newly developed industrial park right off the highway that is not as grim as it sounds. The beer and food and ambience of Tusket Brewing are terrific, and we highly recommend. But again there was no good signal. So we packed our new cooler with beers and were ready to depart from their lot early the next morning. [Side note: A dude in a van from North Carolina off the ferry parked way too close to us overnight; fortunately they were quiet.]
Yarmouth – Wednesday Aug. 7: This is the terminal for ferries from Bar Harbor, Maine. Again we found a waterfront spot and worked in the rain. The sun came out, and we had a great 6-mile running exploration around lunchtime, exploring the downtown and a lighthouse peninsula. We realized we wanted to eat at the restaurant that owned the parking lot where we were squatting, so we made ourselves legal and ate there.
We departed for Digby, bought some world-famous scallops, then headed to Valleyview Provincial Park at the eastern end of the Annapolis Valley for the night. As we pulled up the steep hill, we really were beginning to get a sense of the beauty of the valley.
Bridgeton, NS – Thursday Aug. 8: A good working morning from the park, and nice conversation with couple who had purchased the old Toyota RV of the same kind that I had bought off auction years ago, and could never figure out how to get to the East Coast from Oregon in timely fashion. A poignant memory. They like their RV, and have fixed it up a bit. Would be fun to have one. We drove to our next stop – a Harvest Host location called Horton Ridge further west in the Annapolis Valley. We enjoyed good beers overlooking fields, but had to part in newly packed dirt close to a highway, as the venue was undergoing some construction.
Wolfeville – Friday Aug 9: Another college town, home of Arcadia University. Clearly a bunch of money around based on conditions of houses and restaurants in town. This also is a wine-country get away for people from Yarmouth. More working along the water, parked in the rain. Then rain along a rail trail and checked out Grand Pre, another UNESCO and national tourism site and home to thousands of acres of below-sea-level farmland created by a dike and drainage system built by French settlers. Those settlers were later run off by the British, but then returned. We lunched on kebobs, then had long rainy drive to Antigonish – and had basically completed our eastern lobe circumnavigation at that point.
