The View from the Road Trip

It seems like so long ago already, and I guess it kind of was - it was August 23 when we left Jasper to head to see friends in Vanderhoof. The delay in posting is due to the terrible internet while we were gone, the massive number of photos to sort through, and the fact that school started promptly on our return to Calgary. So I'll probably be stringing out these photos of rocks and trees and water in BC for at least another post, or even two. :)



This is Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. It's an easy stop just after you pass our of Jasper National Park, heading west.

 




Panoramic photo of Purden Lake from Trevor's iPhone

We took a stretch break at Purden Lake Provincial Park, about halfway between McBride and Prince George. It was a bit overcast, but just lovely. Unfortunately, a contractor was there pumping out the outhouses, so if you got too close it didn't SMELL too lovely, but it was a really nice place to stop for a break.

We spent a few days with our friends in Vanderhoof, which is the geographical centre of BC (if you're ever there, eat at Woody's Bakery, which is THE BEST bakery I've ever experienced, and that's really high praise...), and then we headed even further north to Smithers.

 

On our way up to Smithers we took a detour to Fort St James National Historic Site, on Stuart Lake. I hope you go there, but if you do, be warned that your Garmin GPS will not be able to find it. You'll have to watch for the signs, and if you get to the main intersection, you've gone too far. :) It was absolutely beautiful there - the ocean is still several hundred kilometres away, but it's easy to imagine the early traders making the journey inland and arriving at Fort St James. It feels very different from the coastal and southerly BC I know and love - it thrilled the heck out of my internal history geek. :)

 



Recreations of the tea bales that traders would have brought to the fort - the amount of work it would have required to get this tea from China to central BC blows my mind!

 



Trevor kicking back in an early version of a lazy boy, padded with a buffalo skin that was traded into BC from Alberta.

 



Fort St James - so pretty!

 

We took the time to watch the interpretive videos and look in all the buildings, and then got on the road again.

 

The campground we stayed at in Smithers was called Glacier View. See that lump of clouds in the middle of the mountains? Yah, the glacier is behind the clouds. :P Sadly, the weather in Smithers was not quite what I was hoping for (and the campground was too close to the highway for tenting - logging trucks run all night!), but we wandered around the historic downtown, checked out the museum, ate at a good Japanese place, and went to a movie. (The World's End, with Simon Pegg and Martin Freeman - SO FUN!)

 



Our last day there the weather improved, of course...you can see the glacier in the distance... We went to hike Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park, because the website talked about the amazing fossil beds, and the name caught my attention, but alas, we didn't see any driftwood, and the part of the park with the fossils is out of bounds! I was very disappointed! We headed further up the back road to another provincial park, but the trails there were muddier then we were up for, so we headed back to Vanderhoof for another few days with our friends there, and another trip to Woody's Bakery. :) Then we were off to Quesnel for a few days, which shall be another post, because I have German homework to do now...

 

Touring Nova Scotia - The Lighthouse Route

This is part two of my series on Nova Scotia. You can read post one about Halifax here.

For ease of touring, Nova Scotia is divided into seven regions and ten scenic travelways. I don't think we had the seven regions when I was a kid, just the travelways, because simply seeing each scenic logo on the map makes me feel like I'm about ten years old again! Anyway, if you travel clockwise from Halifax, the next region over is called the South Shore and the route is the Lighthouse Route, which stretches from Halifax almost to Yarmouth. The most famous tourist attraction in this region is almost certainly Peggy's Cove.

My dad and I near the Peggy's Cove Lighthouse in 2008

I heard a rumour that the lighthouse is up for sale and that it's in danger of being torn down if no one buys it. My information is kind of out of date, so if anyone has heard anything more recently, please let me know! But I would say that if seeing the lighthouse is on  your bucket list, you should probably go sooner rather than later. :)

The Cove is about an hour from Halifax, and it's a great place to stop for lunch. The tiny community is full of shops and whatnot, but the most famous is the Sou'Wester restaurant and gift shop. It's been there as long as I can remember, and the food is reliable Nova Scotian fare.

From Peggy's Cove, continue up around St. Margaret's Bay until Peggy's Cove Road meets up with St. Margaret's Bay Road. There you have the choice of following SMB Road as it winds along the coast (beautiful!) or continuing a bit further to the 'new' 103 highway. It's about an hour and twenty minutes to Mahone Bay from Peggy's Cove taking the coastal route through Chester. If you skip Chester and take the highway, it's only an hour.

I've never explored Chester, known as a sailing hub, but plan to go next time I'm out there. If you go during Chester Race Week, you might see my brother lurking among the sailboats!

About half way between Chester and Mahone Bay is the infamous Oak Island. When I was a kid the popular theory was that the island was the hiding place of the pirate treasure of Captain Kidd. Since then, probably thanks to the invention of the internet, wild theories abound. It looks like tours go there now in the summer to view the "money pit" (which was originally called that for the pirate treasure, but now has the irony of also being a bit into which modern people sink money in the hope of finding something at the bottom of it...) and I would love to go on those one day.

Mahone Bay is another one of Nova Scotia's top must-see locations. Famous for its skyline of three churches, it's also the home of Amos Pewter, and they have a Pirate Festival in early August, which I'd love to check out.

From Mahone Bay it's about fifteen minutes to Lunenburg, a UNESCO world heritage site, one of five in Nova Scotia. My favourite thing in Lunenburg is the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic. The Fisheries Museum is part of the Nova Scotia Museum system, so considering getting a pass to all 27 museums if you're going to be going to several of them.

Go aboard the ship docked at the museum for a clean look at shipboard life

Lunenburg is the home of the Bluenose, the sailing ship pictured on the Canadian dime, although it's not there very often. Here's a bit of the history of the Bluenose. It's an absolutely beautiful and scenic place to stop.

About half an hour on from Lunenburg is Bridgewater. Honestly, I'm not sure that I've ever stopped there - when I was a kid it was just a place we drove through on our way from point A to point B, but I'll stop next time! It's home to one of Nova Scotia's museums, the Wile Carding Mill. It's also where actor Donald Sutherland, who was born in New Brunswick, grew up.

The most important thing about Bridgewater is that if you don't want to go all the way around the very southern tip of Nova Scotia, this is one of three places where you can cut across the interior and get to the Bay of Fundy. I don't recommend it unless you're extremely pressed for time and in a hurry to get to Wolfville. At the very least, I would go (and have gone) another half an hour on to Liverpool and then across the interior to Annapolis Royal on the Bay of Fundy from there. Next time I'm going all the way around the end though, and that's what we're going to do in this post.

About half an hour from Bridgewater, Liverpool is home to the Perkins House Museum of the Nova Scotia Museum (Simon Perkins was a privateer...), Privateer Days, and Fort Point Lighthouse where Champlain landed in 1604.

Another half an hour on is Thomas H. Raddall Provincial Park, with campsites and walking trails if you need a leg-stretch on the arduous 45-minute trip to Shelburne. :)

I haven't been to Shelburne since I was about five, but it's on my list of places to go again. It's the home of two Nova Scotia Museums - Ross-Thompson House and the Dory Shop. It's also the home of the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, a fascinating and often-overlooked piece of Canadian history. There used to be a small military base there, starting during the second world war, which closed in 1995 and is now apparently decaying, and I'd LOVE to go see it. Apparently a German U-boat surrendered there in 1945, which sounds super interesting.

From Shelburne it's half an hour to Barrington, which is apparently the lobster capital of Canada. It too is home to two Nova Scotia Museums - the Woollen Mill and the Old Meeting House. There's also an independent museum called the Western Counties Military Museum. I don't think I've ever been to Barrington except to drive through, but it looks historically fascinating.

Cape Sable Island is about fifteen minutes from Barrington, and there's a causeway linking the island to the mainland. The pictures make me think of Florida...

You'll now cross the border between the South Shore region and the Yarmouth and Acadian Shores region, but it's still the Lighthouse Trail until you get to Yarmouth.

Pubnico is the first stop in the YaAS region, and it's about half an hour from Barrington. You'll find the Nova Scotia Museum called Le Village historique acadien de la Nouvelle-Écosse. I want to go there very badly. It's one of the places where staff in costumer go about the daily business of life in the Acadian era. So fun!

The Église Ste-Anne Church is the oldest Acadian parish on mainland Nova Scotia, and is a beautiful wooden building. It's about fifteen minutes on from Pubnico and looks like a beautiful place to take a few photos. Another five minutes down the road is the Argyle Township Courthouse and Gaol, Canada's oldest standing courthouse.

At this point it's another fifteen minutes to the town of Yarmouth, which we'll keep for another post. It marks the end of the Lighthouse Route and the beginning of the Evangeline Trail, which, if I HAD to pick a favourite part of Nova Scotia, would probably be it. :) Let me know if you have any questions and I'll do my best to track down ideas or answers for you!

I just realized that this post took about three hours to write. Please don't let my labour be in vain - visit Nova Scotia today! :) And we're having a massive thunderstorm that made the lights flicker, so I'm posting this quickly before I lose all my hard work! If there are any typos, please don't let me know...

Hiking in Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park

Life is funny sometimes. Opportunities come up and you respond to them as you feel appropriate, and I wonder: if we realized the vast consequences tiny decisions can influence, would we be more deliberate in our actions, or would we be paralyzed by indecision, or would we become even more careless when choosing actions? As a fan of scifi, particularly of the Stargate and Star Trek variety, where time travel, temporal paradoxes, and muddled time lines as the result of a moment's hesitation are all in a day's work, I thought I was rather aware of the ripples tiny decisions make, but one of those ripples snuck up and took me by surprise last week. :)

I'm sorry if you're one of the people who's ear I've already talked off about how great Sanctuary was/is, but that's where this ripple started. Last September I discovered my favourite TV show ever (which is really saying something...) and then started following the actors from it as they worked on various other projects, which is how I started watching Hell on Wheels. As the title may suggest, this show is not for the squeamish...it's on AMC, which will probably tell you quite a lot...anyway, the Sanctuary actor I started watching the show for keeps a low internet profile, so I started following the lead actor, Anson Mount, on Twitter. He's an interesting person, and while I don't always agree with him, he's more polite than a lot of Twitter celebrities with whom I don't agree, and he's really great about interacting with his fans.

In April Anson tweeted a blog that someone he knows had written about a visit to the set of Hell on Wheels. Of course I checked it out, and as I was very entertained by Shelli's 'voice', I started at the beginning and caught up on all of her old blog posts, and subscribed to new ones. I have a pretty wide range of blogs I follow, and I'm a fairly regular commenter, because I know how nice it is to know that someone's actually reading what you write. (Insert crickets chirping on my blog here. :) Shelli started chatting back, and eventually she was back in Calgary and emailed me to hang out, which really got me excited, because I really like making new friends, but in person I'm pretty much an introvert when it comes to starting up a conversation, so becoming internet friends first was a good way to get past my initial shyness (which, can you believe, has in the past been taken for snobbery?! :P).

And I figured what better way to introduce someone from LA to my favourite things about Alberta than to take a hike in a place I'd never been! :) Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park is about half an hour from my house, just west of Calgary on the way to Cochrane. It's so close and so beautiful, I can't believe I've never been there before.

CP Rail train and prairie skies!

The paths are mostly paved, and very well maintained. The views were absolutely stunning - we were close enough to Calgary to still glimpse Canada Olympic Park in the east, as well as see the mountains to the west.

Cute little critter!

One of the interpretive signs said that badgers live in the park, and I got really excited, because I didn't know we even had any in Alberta, but the park guide said that they're nocturnal so we wouldn't likely see one anyway. :( Still, we saw enough other things to make the hike worthwhile!

Old general store/post office. The original brick facing is piled up behind and to the left.

I ADORE rural decay. The old store is fenced off so we couldn't get too close, but it was close enough to spark my interest. The park was originally the site of a ranch, and a CP rail town with a brick-making industry. Eventually the town folded and all that's left is this building and a pile of bricks. My minor is in Canadian History, so this is all right up my alley!

It looked like rain!

We walked and talked for hours and hardly even noticed! I tend to get bored fairly easily when doing nothing but walking, because I'm usually multitasking like a crazy person, but when you add in talking about everything under the sun, the time just flew. :) The skies were clouding over and there was a bit of a drizzle by the time we were heading back, but despite faint thunder in the distance, we managed to avoid bad weather. My car needs a bath though...the road into the park is gravel, and very very very dusty!

After leaving the park we headed into Cochrane for some world-famous MacKay's Ice Cream, which you can read about on Shelli's blog...she posts more pictures and isn't as rambley as me... :)

So, thanks to Anson Mount, who I followed because of Hell on Wheels, which I checked out because of Christopher Heyerdahl and Sanctuary, which I first noticed because of Amanda Tapping and Stargate - in short, my fangirling of scifi - I met a friend, hiked, and ate ice cream. And it was a glorious break from a week of helping with Vacation Bible School...which is definitely a story all on its own. :)