Ron & Anne in Canada; 2016: Lights along the coastline.

What a lovely area is Nova Scotia! Yesterday we took a trip East along the coast past beautiful bays, through forests just coming into leaf. Most of the day was dry. but as the day went on the rain came, and it got very cold. But then we are in the Maritimes- the extreme east coast of Canada which sticks right out into the ocean.
Last evening we had decided to go out to a restaurant called the Bicycle thief, a shabby-chic restaurant arguably the best in Halifax, with Italian Cuisine. Anne was very pleased, I was a little less keen on the menu, but ces't la vie!.
(Everything here is in two languages, French as well as English, so my French is improving.(Very Gradually).

Today we left Halifax and travelled South West along the Lighthouse route, taking in Peggy's Cove on the way. A very attractive fishing village, where for the first time we came across tourists, two coachloads of Chinese or Japanese. This lighthouse is reputedly one of the most photographed in the world, I can't imagine how many photos were taken in the fifteen minutes we were there! It is one of the oldest on the coast, going back a couple of hundred years, and many of the 45 residents of the village still fish for a living, if they aren't catering for the tourists.

Just a little further along the coast is a town called Liverpool, and like it's namesake is famous for shipbuilding over the centuries. They also have a very unusual lighthouse, which for obvious reasons is called the hunchback. Liverpool has a river running through called the Mersey, I can't imagine where that name came from!

We took off inland from there, to the Kejimkulic National Park. Just a small park of 380 square kms, it consists of rolling hills and waterways, including the aforementioned Mersey.

We took a walk in the park, crossing this pontoon bridge which swayed alarmingly. If you look closely it dips a bit where Anne is standing! (Must be a leak in one of the pontoons!) We took a walk through the forest, and came across a waterfall where we saw trout trying to leap up it to their breeding grounds.

Tonight we are staying in a town called Digby, on the northern coast of Nova Scotia, and from our room we can look across Funday bay to St John, a city in an adjoining state that we will be visiting in a few days. It's only a mile across, but by road it is around four hundred miles!

Digby is famous for it's scallops, the boats go out for maybe ten days at a time and they re exported all over Canada and beyond. We met a young lady whose husband is a fisherman, at present he is out on the Grand Banks and will not be home for a week or so. We watched as the lobster boats came home as we ate dinner, of course Anne had to have to scallops, she loves seafood.