Day 10: Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The morning was spent walking around Lunenburg, looking at houses, taking pictures, and walking along the wharf. I quite liked the hilly little town with its ornate architecture, although I was a little startled to see how many “for sale” signs were on the houses.

We were able to have lunch at the Magnolia Grill, grabbing the last table available before the noon rush. I had some really astounding fishcakes and scallop chowder (yes, another “Where to Eat in Canada” meal!).
The Bluenose II was in port, and we were able to go down after lunch and walk around on it - it’s a very nice looking boat, even if I don’t know most of what I’m looking at. Will explained some things to me.

We drove out of Lunenburg into rain - one of the few times we’ve seen rain this trip, and again, it was while we were driving. It cleared up after a bit, but was still drizzling a bit when we got to Peggy’s Cove. As we approached it I was musing that the scenery looked quite a lot like Sudbury - big rocks poking out of the evergreens. That similarity quickly disappeared when we came over the last high part to see the lighthouse and the sea, of course! The drizzling rain didn’t stop us from enjoying the big rocks and the lighthouse, although we were disappointed to see that despite what every tourist description said, there is NOT a Canada Post outlet in the lighthouse. Will bought a postcard anyway from the nearest gift shop. My favourite gift shop was the “Buoy and Trap Shop”, which was doubly-aptly named; not only does he sell traps, he constructed the store out of them. I couldn’t tell if the rain was keeping tourists away or not - if it was, I’d hate to imagine how many are there when it’s not raining, because it was pretty overrun. The charm of the cove came through, though, and I appreciated that it’s still a working village, not a Disney attraction.

We still had time to make it to Halifax, which we did, and did some fancy navigating to find the Shubie campground. It’s over on the Dartmouth side, but not really out of town at all - you drive through a subdivision to get to their camp office. We booked for two nights and headed back into Halifax to take a look around. There was a Buskerfest on, which Will was fascinated with, and he settled in to watch a couple of shows while Mike and I wandered downtown a bit. We found a candy shop on Barrington and checked out some of the streets with old buildings. I was glad to see that the Halifax explosion of 1917 (to this day there has been no larger non-nuclear man-made explosion anywhere in the world) had spared some buildings in the old part of downtown, so that there was still neat old architecture for me to look at. We got back to the campground pretty late.