Down East with the Cousins

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Ron:

You are welcome. This place makes taking decent photos easy!

Ed:

No rum but the weather has been beautiful,l we decided to stay an extra day.


Ardra:

If you mean Lunennburg I agree! We are taking the walking tour in the morning to learn more about the homes and town.
 
Jeff Cousins said:
... We are taking the walking tour in the morning to learn more about the homes and town.

The Atlantic Fisheries Museum is very nice, too!
 
Tuesday:  The Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic

We have fallen in love with Lunenburg! We stayed an extra day and Jeff would stay more if we had the time but there are still other places to see before we cross back into Maine next week. Today we spent the morning at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic before enjoying an afternoon cruise on the Bluenose II schooner in a brisk breeze on Mahone Bay. The ship was scheduled two days in advance when we called Monday so we were on a waiting list for Tuesday and fortunately cancellations allowed us to get on the afternoon cruise.

The museum is the center of Lunenburg's tourism efforts that are supplemented with the community's restoration as a British colonial village. The original German, Swiss, and French Protestants were primarily farmers but because of the poor soil quickly turned to the sea for the subsistence. They became fisherman, boat builders, and craftsmen to support those industries. The Museum includes three floors of exhibits as well as several ships along the quay it is located on. The morning and late afternoon after the cruise was not enough time to see everything so Jeff made plans to return tomorrow.

After lunch we joined our 73 other passengers for a two hour cruise on the Bluenose II schooner built in 1963 and operated by the Lunenburg Marine Museum Foundation. The schooner is an exact replica of the famous Bluenose racing fishing schooner that became famous beginning in 1921 and through 1938s as the winner of the International Fishing Racing Cup that never gave up the cup it first won in 1921. The original Bluenose (and all its competitors) had to be a commercial fishing ship to compete so for all those years it was captained by Captain Angus Walters. Angus Walters grew up fishing out of Lunenburg and by the age of 21 was captain of a fishing schooner.

The cruise was our first excursion on a large sailing vessel and traveling at 12 knots while canted 10-15 degrees was a thrill. The crew works most of the time on a short trip like this getting 8,000 square feet of sail up and then back down in a short time.It became even more thrilling when at the moment of the highest deck tilting one of the chain plates that attaches the mast braces to the bulwarks snapped with a very large bang! Fortunately no one was hit by the line and there are a total of eight braces per mast so other than the captain relieving the stress on the mast nothing was affected. Jeff learned later that the crew removed the chain plate and had it repaired in time for the next morning's sailing.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at the Museum, had a delicious dinner on the waterfront, and then climbed the hill back to the motorhome.
 

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Nice to see you got to sail on a REAL sailing vessel.
 
Ned:

At 129 feet it makes what I used to consider a sailboat sort of small. There was another sailing charter in Lunenburg with a 45 foot ketch. 45 feet isn't exactly a rowboat with a sail but compared to us it looked like it was bouncing all over the place.
 

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Actually, that's a ketch, but still a different feel from a 100+ foot vessel.  Tonnage makes all the difference :)
 
Ned:

Noted and corrected.


Tom:

And he plans to put that on Canyon Lake. ;D
 
Wednesday:  Our Last Day in Lunenburg

We started out the day with a walking tour of Old Lunenburg. named as a World UNESCO Site for doing the best job of preserving a planned British colonial settlement it is laid out in a grid pattern and has preserved many historic homes and businesses. One of the unique characteristics of its architecture is know as the Lunenburg Bump, a projecting addition to the front of the home that extends from a roof dormer to the ground. The first floor provides a small entry to remove outer garments, the second floor a "widows" lookout and the third floor room extension.We also visited St John's Church that was extensively damaged in a November 2001 fire and has been completely restored to its original design. The beautiful church is a must stop on a walking tour of the town. We saw several homes reflecting the extensive work done to restore the original architecture of the town's buildings. The Lunenburg Historical District actually purchased some of the structures to prevent the decay, restored them, and then sold them to private parties who agree to maintain them. Lunenburg also has a good number of murals depicting the character of the town.

This afternoon Sue went touring the shopping district on Lincoln Street while Jeff headed back to the Fisheries Museum to finish yesterday's tour. In addition to a Park Canada section displaying the history of the Grand Banks fishery there are extensive rooms full of the artifacts of the town's ship building, fishing, and seafood processing industries.Shows covered such things as launching new ships and all the taboos that went with them such as never using any part of pigs on the boat and never launching on a Friday the 13th or Sunday.

After watching a video on Captain Angus Waters and the Bluenose Jeff was invited to a dory ride around the Lunenburg harbor with a couple of the retired fishing captains who work the Museum and two other couples who were on the quay.

Dinner tonight was a delightful meal at Magnolia's Grill, a small, eclectic restaurant that can hold no more than 20-25 people but has some of the most highly regarded meals in Lunenburg. The scallops were great and we followed up with a drive out to Blue Rocks, a small fishing village out on the point a few miles past Lunenburg.
 

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Jeff and Sue,

You are SO lucky to have gone for a sail on the Bluenose II.  On our last visit they wasn't taking passengers out so we only got to go through it.  Sigh....  Well, guess that just gives us a good excuse to make another trip up there.  ;)

ArdraF

 
Ardra:

The Bluenose is waiting.........

We have a Cousins family reunion every three years in Maine so we will be back.
 
Wendy:

The self-guided walking tour we took covered over 25 buildings that were all representative of the period; really worth the time.
 
Thursday:   A Change of Plans

We were headed for the west end of NS and Yarmouth this morning but last night decided to drive north across the peninsula to Digby and use it as a base of operations for the next three days. Sue has found several stops she would like to make east of Digby and this will allow us to spend an extra day in that area. We will still drive down to Yarmouth and Cape Sable Saturday in the CRV and return here that evening.

We had a relaxing drive across Nova Scotia with little traffic and decent roads. We arrived here around 12:30PM, hooked up and had lunch, and then headed back east to see Annapolis Royal and nearby Port Royal, the second European settlement in North America after St Augustine, Florida.

On the way we stopped at Bear River, the village built on stilts. We are back on the Bay of Fundy with its 40' tides and Bear River's level rises and falls twice a day. We arrived around 3:00PM near low tide so the building construction was exposed. We plan on stopping by in the morning near high tide to see the change in the river.

Our next stop was the Annapolis Tidal Power Project that provides 40 megawatts of power a day, 1 per cent of Nova Scotia's consumption, by trapping the water above the dam at high tide and releasing it at low tide over a set of water turbines that generate the power. It is a great demonstration of clean renewable energy that is reliably generated twice a day. It needs a means of storage to be a complete solution to the Provinces power needs. A new project will be started next year to install tidal flow generators on the channel bottoms that will generate all the time that the tides are flowing in or out.

Designed by its surveyor Samuel Champlain and settled in 1604 The Habitation played an important role in the settlement of Nova Scotia (Le Cadie or Acadia). It was fought over first by different French interests and then changed hands or was attacked 8 times in the next 140 years as France and England fought over the New World. Interestingly the construction of the current Habitation site by Parks Canada was instigated by a Massachusetts resident, Harriet Taber Richardson who believed that since Jamestown colonists had destroyed the Habitation on a raid in 1608 that the US should raise the funds to restore it as a historic site of Canada. The Associates of the Habitation did raise funds and eventually sparked interest by Parks Canada who reconstructed the Site in 1940.

The Habitation was built not as a fort but by commercial interests as a fur trading post with the Micmaq Indians. The accommodations were quite comfortable and most of the residents were support people who maintained the facility and performed housekeeping tasks.

Leaving the Habitation we drove another 10 miles or so west on the peninsula to the east side of the Digby Harbor entrance. At this point we were 4 air miles from the campground and 38 road miles from home! The weather was perfect and we could also see New Brunswick 50 miles away. We returned to Digby for dinner around 6:00PM and called our daughter Laurie to wish her a happy birthday, on 9/11.
 

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We started out this morning for Port Royal to finish our tour and stopped by Bear River to see the town on stilts at high tide. Being back on the Bay of Fundy seems to make these comparisons part of the visit.

We spent the day strolling around Port Royal and visiting Fort Anne, the earliest military fortification in Canada and one with a history of confrontation between the French and English as they fought for control of North America.The Officer's Quarters have been turned into a museum of Port Royal's long 400 year history and was very interesting.

We returned to Digby early and have spent a relaxing evening at home after dinner at a great local restaurant, The Captain's Cabin. It has been an exhausting week.
 

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I like the house on stilt comparison pics....although the water doesn't look much compared to the pictures of Ike out of Galveston !

So did you have lobster AGAIN  :D

Keep relaxing and keep reporting !

Wendy
 
Wendy:

This week it is scallops and clams. Digby likes to be known as the scallop capitol of the world. They sure are good!

There are still plenty of lobsters available up here.
 
Are these the big sea scallops or the little bitty bay ones? I just bought frozen bay scallops today at the store....hate to buy frozen seafood but when you live in Colorado, what are you gonna do?

Wendy
 
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