Liverpool, Digby and high tides...

Leaving Halifax we drove to Liverpool, Nova Scotia, the home of both the Hank Snow Museum and the Sherman Hines Photography Museum. Actually we stayed at a camp site called Fisherman’s Cove at a little fishing village about six kilometers up the road from Liverpool, called Hunt’s Point. Like a lot of communities around Nova Scotia, Hunt’s Point has been around since the late 1700‘s. There we drank some wine with two couples from Duncan, BC and Athabasca, Alberta, as well as the owner of the campsite, a little guy with a big bottle of 151 proof rum - we narrowly managed to avoid the rum.

Pictured below are the family owned fishing boats at Hunt's Cove.


The next day we road our bikes around Liverpool and then drove to Summerville where we had lunch at a great little restaurant called The Quarterdeck, which hung right out over the mile-long Summerville Beach. It poured rain but the food was excellent.

Pictured below is Janice with her pound of mussels at the Quarterdeck Restaurant in Summerville. Note the kids' plastic bucket they provide for the shells.


After it cleared a little we drove to Kejimkujik Seaside National Park and rode our bikes around the trails which led us to some very blustery Atlantic Ocean locations. That night, with the weather still soggy, we watched the Blue Collar Comedy Tour movie that the people from Duncan had lent us. That Ron White guy is funny!

Leaving the Atlantic side of Nova Scotia, we headed for Digby on The Bay of Fundy, where tides are the highest in the world. Digby is also the ‘Scallop Capital of the World’. We drove to Sandy Cove where the beautiful but steep sandy beach gave way to an ocean that looked a little too ferocious for swimming. Instead we elected to spend the afternoon swimming, lolling around and having dinner at warm and clear, Midway Lake. Later we headed for the Digby Wal-Mart to crash.

Pictured below is the main wharf at Digby.


We toured Digby by foot in the morning, bought some seafood at the dockside market, and then drove to Annapolis Royal, one of the first settlements in Canada. I believe 1602 was the year it was first settled so, needless to say, there’s lots of very interesting, mostly wooden, architecture. From there we continued on to Wolfville, the home of Acadia University and, one of my fist idols, Alex Colville. His painting of the horse running down the tracks toward an oncoming locomotive was one of the first images I ever saw that made me want to paint. Our campsite, Evangeline, was actually at Cape Pre on the Minas Basin. At low tide, Minas Basin is the largest expanse of mud flat on the continent, and a very important stop-over for millions of migrating birds.

We hung around the campfire with a couple from Vermont and another from Prince George. The guy from Vermont being a real history buff who actually knew more about Canadian history than either of us Canadian couples did. The next morning we toured the Cape Pres exhibit which is dedicated to where the Acadians had been expelled from Canada - very compelling and a beautiful facility.

Driving up the Minas Basin, on a very humid day, we stopped for lunch to watch the tide flow upriver deicededly upriver - a very weird sensation. There are actually rafting tours that ride the tides. Later we found a campsite at Truro that had a nice big swimming pool that we had all to ourselves.

Pictured below are fishermen at The Minus Basin where we watched the tide run up the river.