August 2008 Family Vacation Part 6

It’s time for a map to get you oriented. Yarmouth is to the left. That’s where the Cat, the high speed catamaran ferry from Maine comes in. Lunenburg is along the lower coast, just to the left of Peggy’s Cove. Shubenacadie is a bit up and to the right of Halifax, right by the 102 road sign. (The Bay of Fundy is the body of water at the top, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

The place where we went sea kayaking is so small it is not on the map, but it is just to the right of the place called Oyster Pond. In fact, I forgot to show you that! When we drove to the sea kayak place we passed that and needed an explanation (thanks, again to Charlie) telling us what we saw.

So all this seemed to be was a raft with a motor, puttering constantly. It moved very slowly and we watched the man pull in what appeared to be a net. There was another person on the back of the raft who would rake in the oysters.

Well, I am just going to preview a bit about where else we went so you can look at the map before going on to other things. From the kayak place we headed on to Cape Breton Island to the town of Louisbourg. That is as far as we could get before heading back to Truro (look up from Shubenacadie) and then, stopping at Digby for lunch back on the Bay of Fundy, into Yarmouth.

I thought, instead of going on to the next place I would show you some other things we saw. Like, we couldn’t believe this! So even though we normally have a “NO McDonalds Rule” when we travel, we had to check the McLobster out. So for lunch on the way to Louisbourg, we stopped at McDonalds and for $6 we each ordered one. There is no way to compare that lobster roll with the wonderful dish we had at Red Eats. We couldn’t even be sure it was lobster meat! Perhaps it is really some white fish, flavored with lobster. So you are NOT missing anything at all by never having this. LOL

We saw such beautiful scenery, despite every day being cloudy or rainy. The weather never slowed us down at all. Okay, maybe we had a few moments of sun, eh?

One last note for this missive on language. The regional accent was not strong. In fact, the only main difference was the pronunciation of the vowel combination “ou”. Where we would usually pronounce it “ow” as in “cow”, they would say an “oo” as in “moo”. For example, the word for highway was route, pronounced “root”.

Of course, being in Canada we did notice the use of the “eh” at the end of sentences. Easy to pick up, as you’ve probably noticed, eh?

Asking for the bathroom was not the right question. They are called “washrooms”. Well, really, we don’t bathe there most of the time, right?

The only other thing I noticed was when I was in phone contact with the places we reserved and was giving them credit card info, they asked for the “expirary” date. Just different enough to enjoy recognizing that we were visiting another culture.

We never did confirm that the @ sign indicated a place to get internet access, but that was our guess.