Friday, July 16- Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

We’re on the second floor of a low lying motel, and the fire alarm went off at 12:20 last night. Julie and Scott woke up out of a sound sleep, but Anna and Emma slept through it, it seems. Julie called down to the front desk to confirm it was a false alarm, and we laid down again. The bell kept going for a good five minutes, but it seemed like longer.

Partly as a result of our restless night, we got a later start this morning. After breakfast, we made one quick shopping stop and then made our way southwest, through evergreen forests to Lunenburg. Lunenburg is a very picturesque seaside village, with several streets of tourist shops to explore and a great waterfront. We arrived there around noon, and our first stop was to book a whale watching tour. It did not leave until 2:30, so we had a little time to have lunch and explore the nearby gift shops, which we certainly did.

We got a chance to see the famous Bluenose II. The original Bluenose schooner is the ship portrayed on the Canadian dime. It is also featured in one of Stan Rogers’s most famous songs which Scott first heard at the Canada pavilion at Epcot Center years ago. We knew that the Bluenose II was not going to be available to tour this summer because it is going through extensive restoration work. We hoped to be able to see her at least, and had to ask directions to find her, but we eventually got to see the ship herself. It seemed a bit anticlimactic where she was, but it didn’t stop Scott from taking lots of pictures and listening to Stan Rogers sing on his mp3 player or buying a beer glass with the ship on it or buying a t-shirt with her picture on it.

At 2:30 we boarded the Eastern Points for a three hour tour. (Yes, we know what Gilligan might say about that.) First, the boat crew took us on a quick tour of the harbour and we were shown a large number of interesting sites for the relatively small area that we covered. We got a closer look at the Bluenose II, and we got to see five generations of fishing boats, some of which were docked as exhibits for the fishing museum and some of which are still in use. We saw the buildings that, until recently, were featured on the Canadian $100 bill. We saw the boat house where Hollywood’s H.M.S. Bounty and the H.M.S. Surprise (from the movie Master and Commander) were built. We saw the Farley Mowat, currently impounded by the Canadian government for aggressive Greenpeace-style anti-whaling activities. We even saw a few porpoises off in the distance as we left the harbor. Emma, of course, fell asleep from the vibration of the motor of the boat almost immediately, but she woke up when things really got good.

We went out past the mouth of the harbour, and thar she blows! We saw minke whales! (pronounced: Mink-key). They are a baleen whale, so they are related to the humpback whale, but they are much smaller. We saw several of them “venting.” Most of the views we got of them were as their back slowly rolled out of the water past us. Julie took at least one good picture of one, but it was hard to do because it happened so quickly each time and we were all so excited to see them. Once or twice we got a look at the whale’s “face” and it had a snout like a humpback. We’re not sure how many of them there were, but eventually we saw several different individuals. The ships crew was up higher than we were and could see down into the water and often had tips for where they were about to surface. The crew said we were seeing two different individuals at first, one smaller than the other, and later we saw different whales in a different place.

The other animal we got a good look at was the harbour seal. There was at least one little guy who looked like he was following our boat. He’d stick his head out of the water and watch us curiously. Perhaps he was hoping we’d throw him some food. Most of the time, there was just one seal’s head that we could see so we think it was the same one most of the time. Anna got some pictures of him. There were several others that we saw, but this guy got the most attention from us.

The weather was overcast and on the cool side all day, but that seems appropriate for an afternoon out on the North Atlantic, eh? It was foggy, but we had pretty good visibility most of the time. We were always within sight of land, in spite of the fog. We got a misty rain after we saw the whales though, and the twenty or so people onboard with us went to the front of the boat, where there was a little bit of cover. The boat wasn’t packed, though, so there was still room to move around. On our return to the Lunenburg, we passed “the Ovens”, which are several large round caves that the sea has worn out of cliffs.

After we returned to the docks, we had a pizza dinner at the building that used to serve as the Lunenburg jail but which now offers an overlook of the wharfs. Then we took the scenic way home, and made several picture stops along the way. The first was in Mahone Bay. We had passed through that town earlier on our way to Lunenburg, and Julie said the town was so cute she wanted to pinch its cheeks. We stopped to get a picture of Mahone Bay that shows its three churches next to each other. It’s a view that is used on many postcards and calendars. Then we proceeded on to Peggy’s Cove. On our way there, we saw the memorial to the people who died nearby in the Swissair Flight 111 crash in 1998. We got to the lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove sitting on the many large round rocks. Emma had too much fun climbing on the rocks and we eventually had to reign her in. We did get to see the dramatic seascape and the picturesque lighthouse itself before we had to make our way back to Halifax. We also saw two very large does on the way home. We’re not sure what they were specifically. They were deer, not moose, but they looked so much bigger than the deer in our area. We got back to our hotel after dark.