Lunenburg – Meanderings & Mind Munchies

Yarmouth

I’m combining everything we did while in Yarmouth because, frankly, we didn’t do much.

First, some final thoughts about Nova Scotia before we head back to the States tomorrow. Much of this stuff applies to New Brunswick, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island, too.

The hiking opportunities are limited and not particularly interesting.
Although there are rail trails that do permit biking, the trail surfaces tend to be too soft and gravelly for e-bikes.
The churches here are very pretty, with lovely trim, windows, and tall steeples. I would have loved to have stopped and taken more photos of them, but Greg was driving. 😆
There are plenty of places for kayaking, but we rarely saw any scenery that we would have enjoyed viewing from the water.
The absolute best way to eat lobster is steamed with melted butter. None of this lobster roll or creamed lobster stuff! Yuck.
The weather in Nova Scotia in August is gorgeous, but be prepared for lots of foggy mornings in Yarmouth. And as one park employee told us, if you don’t like the weather, just hang around for another 10 minutes, because it’s sure to change!
Don’t expect to see many pretty lighthouses, and don’t expect to find them easily.
The best whale watching tours take off from Brier Island or Long Island.

Lighthouse day

As I said, we didn’t do much while we were here, but one day we decided to drive around and see how many lighthouses we could find. We started with the Cape Forchu Lighthouse.

Note the blue sky in the first couple of photos.

This lighthouse is called an apple core lighthouse because of its shape.

And then the fog rolled in…

Next, we headed to Bug Light, which is way out on Bunker’s Island in the Yarmouth Harbor.

After that thrilling sight, we headed to Pubnico Lighthouse. I don’t know how, but Greg managed to make this lighthouse look significantly more impressive than it deserved.

This is Greg’s photo. It is a close-up view because the beach is unattractive, and off to the right are giant wooden platforms holding hundreds of lobster traps with dead crabs in them.

Our final lighthouse of the day was the Abbott’s Harbour Lighthouse. To get to it, we discovered, you have to walk through an Acadian living history settlement.

We arrived just after it had closed, which is a shame because it looked like it would have been interesting.

Anyway, one of the employees told us that we were welcome to walk through the property to see the lighthouse.

I was disappointed because it was impossible to see the water from the lighthouse, and there was no way to get a photo of the lighthouse from the water.

I did get these photos from the water’s edge, though.

Greg was stung by a bee while we were there, so we decided to use that as an excuse to go out to dinner on the way back to the camper. We decided on Rudder’s Seafood and Brewery because it named two of our favorite things: seafood and beer!

As we were leaving the restaurant, the fog once again rolled in.

And just so you know what I mean about pretty churches, here is a photo I took of St. John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg.

And this is how we spent much of our time while in Yarmouth. 👇

Bye, Bye, Nova Scotia!

The Ovens Natural Park

Today, we visited a small private park near Lunenburg called Ovens Natural Park. It is known for its sea caves and slate cliffs.

It is possible to kayak into the sea caves during high tide, and if we had been in Lunenburg longer, I might have tried to talk Greg into doing that.

These cement steps lead to an underground tunnel with a view of the interior of one of the sea caves.

The view of the entrance to the sea cave.

The interior of the sea cave. Through that hole in the back wall, deep underground, we could hear the thunder of the waves.

Lunenberg

After visiting Ovens Natural Park, we headed to the golf course across the harbor from Lunenburg to see if we could get a good picture of the town.

I tried zooming in on the town to take a picture, but the photo looked grainy, and the details were not crisp. I had better luck taking an unzoomed photo and cropping it.

This photo was taken from the town of Lunenburg looking toward the golf course. The harbor had a large number of double masted sailing boats.

I love all of the pretty colors! Lunenburg really is a cute town. It is fairly touristy, though.

Greg was really excited to see the historical reproduction of the Bluenose schooner. Unfortunately, it was out of town at a regatta while we were visiting.

There is more that we could have done while we were in Lunenburg, but our last day was taken up with another ER visit and stop at the pharmacy to get medicine.

There is a bike path from Lunenburg to Mahone Bay that would have been fun. And I wouldn’t have minded a boat tour of the harbor, a visit to the Fisheries Museum, a walk through Mahone Bay, or a whiskey tasting at Ironworks Distillery.

Lunenberg food tour

After a leisurely morning, we drove to Lunenburg for a walking food tour. We met our tour group at the Bluenose Lodge, where we had seafood chowder.

Next, we walked down the street to the Tin Roof Distillery, where we sampled some 15 different flavors of whiskey.

While we were there, our guide had us try some traditional Lunenburg foods: Solomon Gundy (pickled herring), Lunenburg pudding (a really dense sausage), sauerkraut, and rum cake.

Over the next hour and a half, we tasted bacon and cheddar scones with cranberry juice, chicken salad with cranberries, haddock bites, lobster rolls and fresh potato crisps.

While we ate, our guide told us about the history of Lunenburg and some of its notable citizens. I learned that Lunenberg is best known for fishing, ship building, and rum running. Its colorful buildings make it one of the prettiest cities in Canada.

The bump-out on the front of the building is called “a Lunenburg bump.” It was a way for homeowners to showcase their wealth. The house in the photo below also has one.

Our tour group. (From left: Greg, a freelance journalist from England, a couple from Seattle, and our tour guide.)

Lobster and Luminescence kayak tour

Later that day, we headed to Blue Rocks, a small fishing village, for our Lobster and Luminescence kayak tour. The weather was threatening to storm.

Just as we were climbing into the kayaks, a rainbow appeared on the horizon.

The group, heading out. Once again, Greg and I were the oldest folks on the trip.

Usually, Greg and I are extremely prepared for whatever adventure we decide to do. This time, unfortunately, we both forgot to put our water shoes in the car. That would not have been a problem except for the fact that Greg’s shoes were almost too large to handle the foot pedals that controlled the tiller of the kayak. As a result, we were often heading off in the wrong direction.

You can see the rain falling in the distance. We experienced a couple of showers over the course of the trip.

As the sun was setting, we pulled up to a tiny island to enjoy our lobster roll dinner. Along with lobster rolls, we had potato salad and frosted chocolate brownies.

The little girl in the long-sleeved pink shirt talked everyone into playing a guessing game (she didn’t exactly take no for an answer), where she would think of an animal and we would have to ask her questions until we could figure out what the animal was.

Once it was fully dark, we climbed back into our kayaks and headed off for the luminescence part of the tour.

Let me tell you, it is not easy to kayak in the dark! Especially not under a new moon. We brought headlamps with us, but if we had used them, we would not have been able to see the luminescence in the water, not to mention the fact that the mosquitoes swarmed the light.

It became increasingly difficult for me to tell the difference between other kayakers and rocks jutting out of the water.

At times, I didn’t know whether to direct my eyes to the sky, which was filled with stars and the Milky Way, or into the water, where our paddles disturbed bioluminescent algae, causing bright sparkles to swirl through the water. It was magical. If we dipped our hands in the water, we could capture them in our palms.

Once back at the camper, we decided to take our cameras and see if we could get some photos of the night sky. Sadly, my camera refused to work at all, but Greg was able to get this photo of the Milky Way with some of the Perseid meteor showers captured in it. Better yet, we were able to catch one of the meteors shooting across the sky with our own eyes.