Day 62 – Lunenburg and Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia

This time our camp spot was located within walking distance of a town. Although it had rained again during the night and it was still raining lightly we decided to walk to town and risk getting wet. Why else had we packed our raincoats anyway? But we did not take the bikes, and do not know whether we again leave them unused here. (Ah, well. They make a nice ornament on the tail of our trailer.)

We walked along many of the main streets of Lunenburg and enjoyed the ‘old look’ of the houses here. Even though basically all the houses followed one of only five basic structural patterns they all looked a bit different as their owners had made various customizations to them to make them unique each one from the others. The varied coloured paint coats they were given added to their individuality. Together these qualities in turn help strongly to make Lunenburg the special place that it is. If you are ever in Nova Scotia we would definitely suggest that this town is a “can’t miss”.

As we walked, the rain finally stopped and the sun started to come out. When this happens it gets hot very fast to the point that it becomes a very uncomfortable, humid heat.
On our walk we came to a most beautiful church. It was called St. John’s Church and its first version was the first church built in the town in 1753. All denominations initially used this church and then later built their own places of worship. In its present incarnation, which was completed in 1892,the church had beautiful stained glass windows which Leo tried to capture for you in his photos. The most remarkable thing about this church was that it had burned down almost completely in 2001 and had since been totally restored again by the local people. To look at it now one would never guess that it had endured this crisis. We also visited the Lutheran Church which had a beautiful pipe organ which again Leo tried to capture.

Lunenburg (http://www.lunenburgns.com/our-town-content/history-of-lunenburg.html)
is a UNESCO Heritage site and was first established by German immigrants whose influence is still present in the houses here. We had a really nice lunch at a restaurant along the wharf and then went back to our trailer. After a drink we went out again to visit Mahone Bay another small community to the east of Lunenburg. Here Leo walked around ‘naked’ (carrying no cameras) for the first time on our vacation but no one in the town seemed to notice the importance of this event. No parents pointed Leo out to their children, nor spoke in hushed tones to them about how he was wearing no imaging tools. We did some ‘shopping’. We went to the bakery to buy some bread, oatmeal cakes and a $2.20 brownie for Leo which in Calgary would cost $0.75. (He remains convinced that he was overcharged because he was walking around `naked`). However, it was late in the afternoon and the town shops closed at 5 or 5:30 pm so we did not get to visit a lot of the souvenir shops unfortunately.

Back to the trailer we went again and later that evening Leo went out to take some evening and night pictures of Lunenburg which can be seen in the pictures for today to be found here.