Home from NS and PEI

Yesterday Ken and I returned home from our ten-day jaunt to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

I'd mentioned to Ken in March that it would be nice to go up to Nova Scotia and check out some of those good Canadian yarn shops. Ken was game for it, and before we knew it we'd decided to go to Newfoundland as well.

Then we came to our senses. Ken has friends in St. John's, NFLD, and if we went to that island, we'd definitely want to pay them a visit. But once you get off the NS to NFLD ferry (a trip of something like 8 hours across the choppy seas), it's a 500-mile drive across the island to St. John's. It just didn't seem feasible to us to make Newfoundland a part of this trip. So we decided to go only to Nova Scotia....

But then, I mentioned a woolen mill on Prince Edward Island that I'd love to visit, and getting to that tiny island is easy from NS, so our itinerary became Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island in ten days. Easily do-able.

We drove from southern Maine to New Brunswick the first day, then on to Halifax the second. The top photo shows you the weather that greeted us in Halifax.

Our hotel was located across Halifax Harbour in Dartmouth, so we hopped the little passenger ferry any time we wanted to go into the city.

One day we spent touring the coastline from Halifax south to Lunenburg. Our first stop was Peggy's Cove, an adorable little fishing village with quaint scenes like the one above. The Peggy's Cove lighthouse is my banner photo at the moment.

It was just off Peggy's Cove that Swissair Flight 111 crashed in 1998. I remember hearing stories after this air disaster of the kindnesses extended by the people of Peggy's Cove to family and friends of those who died aboard the flight. There is a monument in memory of the victims just a short drive from the heart of Peggy's Cove.

After we left Peggy's Cove, we drove farther down the coast to Lunenburg. This is where Ken and I spent our first night in Nova Scotia on our honeymoon in 1970. (Wink) It's a fishing village, naturally, and there's an interesting fishermen's museum there.
I love the colorful buildings in Lunenburg. Actually, colorful buildings can be found in almost any of Nova Scotia's coastal villages.

The two fishing vessels to the left were actually docked in Halifax Harbour. I wanted to show you that not every day in Nova Scotia was rainy! All of them were quite chilly, though. Ah, well, we enjoyed ourselves despite the less-than-ideal weather.

This last photo I took in the Hydrostone district of Halifax. Ken and I walked from the harbour front to the Hydrostone district specifically so I could visit a yarn shop there. We easily walked ten miles that day, no exaggeration. Once we found the shop, we discovered it was closed because it was Canada's Victoria Day. So that was that. We walked back to the harbour and consoled ourselves with a delicious seafood lunch.

BUT, my reason for including the photo of the Hydrostone district is to tell you about the Halifax Explosion of 1917.

My mother would have been thirteen years old then. She lived on a remote farm about 25 miles from Fredericton, NB. One day her father, my Grampy Haines, was out working in his fields when suddenly he noticed all of his cows were startled and looked to the east.

Grampy was curious as to what had caused his cows to do this. It was several days later, when the newspaper arrived, that he read of the tragic Halifax Explosion. He realized his cows had managed to hear the explosion or, perhaps, to feel the earth shake, even though Halifax was a good 300 miles or more from his farm.

The Hydrostone buildings, named for the type of granite used in their construction, were built after the explosion to replace homes that had been destroyed. Check out the link I've provided to read more about this devastating accident in Halifax Harbour.

In my next post I'll share our next stop: Baddeck and Cape Breton Island. After that comes Prince Edward Island. The story of my yarn-cation will be a post all by itself. Stay tuned, please.