Coasting Through Nova Scotia

Realizing that we have rounded the bend and are now headed home, Carolyn hauled out the pebble we gathered at Qualicum Beach...

 And made a deposit at Murphy's Cove.

 At nearby Taylor Head on the south coast of Nova Scotia, we encounter a beached sea monster.

Peggy's Cove is all that it is cracked up to be, from this sculpture in living granite (fisherfolk have time on their hands in the off season).

To picturesque vignettes everywhere you look.

We were there on a blustery day which probably means less tourists per square inch. At it's heart, a working village, population: 35

A great surprise was The Ovens. A beach with sea caves which had a gold rush in the 1860s.

People were still panning on the beach.

Not Fred Flinstones car; quartz intrusions were ground up with these stones for local slucing.

Lehavre had the best City Hall so far. Local government cut to the bone.

Cape St Mary is the western extreme of Nova Scotia. Now heading along the Fundy shore...

Where we camp in fog at Blomidon...

And the bottom drops out of the ocean at Wolfville.

Stay tuned.

Merry Times in the Maritimes

A peek at EsDora's further adventures.

At North Point PEI Wind Research Facility, Carolyn provides scale. The Danish have cornered the market on really big, really efficient windmills. The outside edges of the Maritimes are festooned with giant windmills. Our cousin Len will tell us correctly that his one big power plant at Lake Wabamun made more electricity than all the installed windmills in the nation. But here on the edge of civilization, being able the make your own juice must be a local comfort.

Miss this sign and the next stop is Iceland.

Fascinated by the Acadians. They moved here to get away from all the nonsense between the French and English, created farmland from nothing, made friends with the Mi’gmaw, invented Co-ops & Credit Unions, ended up refusing to swear allegiance to either British or French, were exported, deported and semi-exterminated, and have ended up with the tidiest neighbourhoods in Canada, living on wits and local resources and time to enhance a rich culture and be world class party animals. Their cousins, the Cajuns participate actively. There are a lot of Louisiana licence plates in Maritime RV parks. And fiddles, lots of fiddles...

Acadian humour. Wearing gloves and a muffler.

To get to the other side...

Summerside artisans hauled their production lines out onto the streets.

While we had lunch over-looking this beach, these guys forked $500 worth of tide deposited seaweed into their pick-up. I swear the Acadians could make an economy by selling rocks to each other until they all got fabulously wealthy.

Confederation Bridge is truly impressive.

So why are my knuckles so white?

Onto Nova Scotia:

Cyrus Eaton convened a conference dedicated to world peace at this estate in Pugwash and, voila! 54 years later, still no nuclear Armageddon. You can’t make the world a perfect place but you can make it better. Can you imagine tiny 1957 Pugwash Nova Scotia crowded with KGB, CIA, MI5 and other burly spooks trying to figure out how to stop these guys?

At Canso, a volunteer group is trying to save a transatlantic cable station. In the good old days before routers and WiFi, a repeater was a guy who listened to a faint signal which he re-keyed in Morse Code to the next station. After a couple of shifts, one could become “dit happy”.

Canso, at N45°20′2″ W060°59′43″, is our most easterly Degree on THIS trip. The crew of EsDora the Second remain resolute and amused as she commences a long turn for home.