The Maritimes

I’ve covered Canada before on this blog site but it’s a country I like and also my daughter lives there so I tend to go there a lot. It is also big and whilst it is true that the entire population with the exception of a few people who like really cold weather live within a hundred miles of the USA border, there’s an awful lot of tamed Canada left to visit before I even think about seeing the untamed bit. Nearly four years ago I booked a holiday in the east of the country for the summer of 2020. It was a really good itinerary if I may say so myself. We were to visit Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and have a few days in Montreal. Rebecca was going to fly across from Victoria, a flight almost as long as ours from the UK, to join us. Of course in March 2020 we went into lockdown and whilst it was by no means certain that the holiday was off at first, it soon became obvious that this holiday was to fall victim to the pandemic. It was pretty miserable having to cancel the holiday one Airbnb at a time. There was always a hope that we would get the chance to do it again but it wasn’t going to be for a while. Travel to Canada didn’t really become practical for two years. We went back to Canada last year but to the west and I followed that up with my Trans-Canada rail trip last autumn which included a couple of days in Halifax, one of the destinations of our original itinerary. By then, however, I’d already booked some flights to Montreal for summer 2023 and was soon spending some happy hours securing accommodation, again through Airbnb. In fact I looked to see if I could book the places we had intended going to in 2020. Only one of those was available so I booked it and worked out an itinerary around it.

Canada has ten provinces and three territories. Most are really rather huge but in the east there are three small ones that are collectively known as The Maritimes. These are New Brunswick, Nova Scota and the smallest province of them all, Prince Edward Island. We would visit all three along with Montreal in Quebec. Had we managed to fit in a trip to Newfoundland, this blog would be titled Atlantic Canada. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador is lumped together with the three Maritimes provinces to form Atlantic Canada. We toyed with the idea but that would have been a lot to fit in to the two weeks we had allocated for this holiday. Once finalised, the itinerary was this: Fly to Montreal and spend one night in the world’s grottiest airport hotel (in my defence I didn’t realise it was quite as bad as it was until we got there) and then fly to Halifax. Rebecca would fly into Halifax the same day and we’d spend three nights in the Nova Scotian capital city. Then it would be two nights in St Martins, New Brunswick, three nights on Prince Edward Island and three nights on Cape Breton Island which is the northern third of Nova Scotia. After that it was back to Halifax Airport to drop off the hire car and fly to Montreal where we would have three nights before returning home, Rebecca westwards, us eastwards.

Halifax

Our flight to Montreal arrived in the evening so we had decided to overnight in an airport hotel called L’Auberge de l’Aeroport. It was bad. Should you ever find yourself requiring a night in a Montreal Airport hotel, I’d give this one a miss. The airport transfer was handy though and we were back at the airport the following morning for our Air Canada flight to Halifax. Once there we collected the hire car keys and waited for Rebecca’s flight from Halifax. It was on time and we finally set off to Halifax, a half hour drive away. Our Airbnb was an apartment in an old house in a residential part of the town but only a ten minute walk from the centre. It was too late to discover the city other than the nearby Sobey’s supermarket where we stocked up on supplies. To be honest, visiting a supermarket is always quite a fun part of any foreign holiday, even in places like Canada where the prices had my inner Yorkshireman yelling “‘ow much?” This gave us two days to discover Halifax. The main thing we discovered over those two days was that it rains a lot. It didn’t rain at all when I was there last October but having extolled its virtues to Elaine and Rebecca, we got to see it at its gloomiest and, of course, wettest. It was a shame as it is actually a nice town. Not stunningly beautiful or particularly elegant but it has an attractive waterfront and a nice vibe about the place. Like a lot of Canadian cities there tends to be a lingering aroma of cannabis that not even the rain could dampen down and personally I could do without it but this is the world we live in I suppose. It has history, not all of it pleasant, and there are plenty of restaurants that cater for most tastes. It’s just a shame I can’t really comment more about it. The rain, along with the fact that Rebecca was feeling a bit under the weather (no pun intended) meant we didn’t really get the best of the place. After our third night we packed up and left but did call into Fairview Lawn Cemetery. This is a large public graveyard which just happens to be the last resting place of 121 victims of the Titanic disaster of 1912. The graves are set out in the shape of a ship’s hull and it is quite a moving place. There are memorials to some of the victims of the Halifax Explosion of 1917. Google it if you don’t know. It’s a sad story.

Leaving Halifax, we set out to discover Peggy’s Cove Lighthouse. There’s lots of lighthouses in the Maritimes but the most famous one of the lot is Peggy’s Cove. It’s an hour or so from central Halifax and stands on some impressive rocks that are lapped and sometimes battered by the waves of the North Atlantic Ocean. The good news was that the rain stayed away. The bad news was that it was replaced by fog. Instead of getting to see the famous Peggy’s Cove Lighthouse in all her dramatic glory, we finally got to see it peering moodily out of the mist. It was quite nice in a way but you can’t help feeling a little disappointed that the one day you are there it is totally invisible until you get within a couple of hundred metres of it. Just to the south is the memorial to those who died in the Swissair 111 crash in 1998 so I felt it only fitting that as an avgeek and former Air Traffic Controller we should pop in and pay our respects. We had lunch in the costal town of Lunenburg. This is a typical Nova Scotian fishing town of which I believe there are a few dotted along the coastline to the south of Halifax. It was very pretty and did a good line in seafood restaurants and we left wondering if we should have spent a bit more time discovering the others. However, we had to move on, driving to the port of Digby where we boarded the ferry across the Bay of Fundy to Saint John in New Brunswick. There we were greeted by an absolute cloudburst which accompanied us on our journey north to St Martins, a small town near which our next Airbnb was located.

Bay of Fundy

We only had two nights here so were forced to cram all our New Brunswick activities into one day. I do believe we managed it. The main attraction was the Bay of Fundy itself. Its situation means is has the highest tidal range of anywhere in the world. The best place to experience this was Hopewell Rocks which was a couple of hours drive away and the best time to see it was low tide which happened to be 6pm. That gave us time to have a look round the pretty St Martins harbour with its two covered wooden bridges before a drive along the Fundy Trail Parkway. True to form it was raining and also foggy so all the lookout points along the way were rendered rather useless. After a lunch break, however, the weather cleared allowing us a nice walk along the mouth of Big Salmon River. The Parkway has a lot of trails to offer so we couldn’t take full advantage of it but it is definitely worth a visit. It was another hour and a half to Hopewell Rocks and we arrived at a good time. If you have ever had cause to find information on the Bay of Fundy, the first images you will see are of the sea stacks of Hopewell, sitting on the seabed with the sea somewhere in the distance. Twice a day the base of these rocks are exposed by the retreating tide and lots of people go there to see them. Don’t be put off by the number of visitors though, it’s a fascinating experience. Just remember to take appropriate footwear as it is understandably quite muddy down there being underwater for half the day and all that. If you are brave or maybe foolhardy, you can scramble over the rocks at the southern end of the Hopewell National Park area which Rebecca and I did. Elaine, whose arm was in a cast due to a broken wrist she had suffered a few weeks previously whilst, incidentally, scrambling over rocks, wisely declined the chance. We met her later in the cafe with all our bones intact. It was an even longer drive back thanks to the Fundy Trail Parkway being closed in the evening but the long journey was worth it. Hopewell Rocks is a must-see place if you are on that part of the world.

Prince Edward Island

The following day was another road day. The drive was mainly on rather boring highways but we did cross the impressively long Federation Bridge. This eight mile structure, opened in 1997, connects Canada’s smallest province with the rest of the country. It claims to be, and who am I to doubt it, the word’s longest bridge over ice-covered water. We had already suffered some inclement weather on this trip but there would have had to have been something pretty wrong with the climate had the Northumberland Straight been iced over in July. Our billet in Prince Edward Island was a few miles east of the capital city, Charlottetown. The real draw of this place was it was on the owner’s smallholding which was home to quite a lot of animals. This pleased certain members of our party no end and, frankly, had we not gone anywhere else on the island I doubt there would have been any complaints. It takes more than a load of goats, dogs, donkeys horses and cats to make a decent travel blog though so we needed to get out and about and discover a bit of the island at least. Unfortunately the first full day we had there it rained all the time. So much so there were weather alerts issued by the Canadian meteorological office. We did visit Charlottetown which seems to be a nice place, but were restricted to indoor activities. Theres a few of those but probably not worth making a long trip for. Even the Cows Ice Cream factory was closed for the Canada Day public holiday so a visit to the shop there revealed nothing other than idle machinery. Nice ice cream though. There was an art gallery and a decent pub lunch but, well, that was it. The following day was much better. There are a lot of trails and hikes on PEI. We found one of them, the Greenwich Dune Trail. This took us through some woodland and across a floating pontoon to the dunes and ultimately a beach which was lapped by the waters of the Gulf of St Lawrence. It’s a nice little walk as long as you arm yourself with a decent insect repellent (we use the wonderfully named Flies Undone) as the mossies are persistent little buggers. We even had a picnic on the beach. The nearby village of St Peter’s Bay provided us with a most entertaining demonstration of how to eat oysters by Julio, a man who clearly loves his job as a champion schucker. He couldn’t persuade me or Elaine to try the phlegmy bivalves but Rebecca downed half a dozen of them. We drove back to base via another lighthouse which might not have been as iconic as Peggy’s Cove but at least it wasn’t shrouded in fog. The sun came out and we had a pleasant barbecue. With us leaving the following morning, we were done and dusted with PEI and hadn’t even been to see Anne of Green Gables which seems to be the one thing the province is famous for.

Cape Breton

A word about ferries. To cross the Northumberland Strait you have a choice of the aforementioned Confederation Bridge of the Northumberland ferry. The latter sails from close to where we were staying on PEI to Caribou, Nova Scotia. We were booked on it. It was cancelled due to technical issues. It reopened just as we arrived in PEI. We booked on it again. It was cancelled again due to further technical issues. This meant we had to leave PEI via the bridge which was very much the long way round to get to our next stop which was near the top of Cape Breton Island. The drive was three hours longer than it would have been. This wasn’t exactly a great start to our three days in Cape Breton but things picked up. So much so in fact that I can say it was the best part of our trip. Cape Breton is basically the top bit of the province of Nova Scotia. It is separated from the rest of the province by the Strait of Canso across which the Canso Causeway carries the Trans Canada Highway. Whilst it is less than a mile from the southern part of Nova Scotia, it has a distinctly different feel. Cape Breton has a Gaelic heritage which is reflected in some of the place names. Road signs are often multi-lingual and Gaelic is still spoken in some of the villages. We were staying in the north of the island near the town of Sydney Mines. The industrial history was quite interesting, as was the fossil museum, but it is safe to say most visitors to that part of the world are there for the scenery. Our first exposure to the scenery was on a Puffin Boat tour. There’s a two of these to choose from. We chose Bird Island Boat Tours which basically did exactly what it said on the tin. We cruised round a couple of islands off Cape Dauphin which were home to numerous seabirds including the incredibly cute puffin. As it happens there were far more razorbills which look a bit like puffins but that only made it all the more special when the puffins came into view. The best place for scenery, however, was the Cabot Trail. This is a road trip around the very north of Cape Breton, a bit like the Canadian version of Scotland’s North Coast 500. We could have driven round it in the one day we had left but that would rather waste the opportunity to get out and enjoy the place so we concentrated on the eastern section. For perhaps the first time in the entire trip we had a lovely sunny day but even then there were patches of mist that took a while to burn off but I did manage to wear the sunhat I’d bought in Halifax Airport ten days earlier for the first time. After an insanely short trip on the Englishtown Ferry we went for a bit of a walk, had lunch at a seafood shack in a place called Neil’s Harbour (naturally I had to go there), discovered a remote fishing village and just for good measure had a look round an abandoned quarry too. It was worth the drive and left us wondering just how good the other side of the Cabot Trail could be. Maybe it’s a reason to go back. We had a barbecue that night back at the Airbnb where the mossies took a particular shine to my bare legs. The previous night we had visited Sydney, the biggest town in that part of the world. There is a gaelic festival that takes place every autumn which was no good to us as we were there in July but during the summer they have a ‘light’ version of it called Kitchenfest. There was some music happening in an Irish pub so I had to break my ‘no Irish pubs unless I’m in Ireland’ rule to attend. I’m not celtic music aficionado so I don’t know how authentic the music was but it involved fiddles and stuff so I know they were trying if nothing else. It was a pleasant evening. I even had a Guinness. I don’t like it very much but it got me (and Rebecca) into the swing of things. After three nights in Cape Breton we had to say goodbye to the place and made the four hour journey back to Halifax Airport. Nova Scotia is just a tiny part of Canada but it isn’t small. There, an Air Canada A220 whisked us off to Montreal and our much delayed Maritimes experience was over.

Montreal

Montreal is in Quebec which is not part of the Maritimes but I’ll give you this as a bonus paragraph. We arrived on the evening of the 43rd Montreal Jazz Festival. Our apartment (not an Airbnb for a change but booked through Booking.com) was very central so we soon found ourselves walking through the street where Jazz was about to happen. It was packed with Jazz fans and, probably, non-Jazz fans who just happened to find themselves in Montreal that weekend. We discovered an interesting restaurant that served, amongst other things, fermented chips for dinner. Over the course of the next two days we ‘discovered’ the the city and came to the conclusion that it was rather nice. The European influence is noticable and not just because people speak French. My CSE French is understandably rusty as I took it 45 years ago but the locals weren’t particularly bothered and would break out into perfect English if they realised you were having a few problems understanding them, which was like every time they spoke. The city itself, at least the bit we wandered around, is full of tree lined streets and has a waterfront that is slowly being transformed from its derelict industrial past to something of a leisure destination. Mount Royal, after which the city is named, is a pleasant, if somewhat uphill, public park which affords views over the city and the St Lawrence. It was a humid day so we were sweating a bit by the time we reached the lookout point but it left us feeling virtuous which is of course half the fun. The next day it rained all day which meant wandering round under umbrellas and nipping into art galleries. Ironically, the day after that our activities were limited due to the fact it was hot and sticky so another museum, the old Governor’s house to be precise, provided us with shelter from the excesses of the weather. It was also the day we flew home, Rebecca heading to the airport in the afternoon, and us, after sitting in a pub and enjoying my first and only poutine in the place where it was invented, in the evening. Montreal had left a good impression and it’s a place we would like to go back to.

Maritimes, yes or no?

Four years in the making, The Maritimes provided us with some good memories. Yes, the weather wasn’t particularly great, in fact it was something of a washout some days, but between the rain clouds we saw some memorable things. We didn’t dislike anywhere we went but the highlights for me were the Bay of Fundy at Hopewell Rocks and the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton. The brief glimpse of Nova Scotia to the south of Halifax suggested it was a shame we didn’t have more time there and we certainly could have done with an extra day or two in Cape Breton. Would I recommend it? Yes, but take an umbrella just to be on the safe side.