Day 63 – Drive to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia

Saturday, August 30, 2008

It is time to leave Lunenburg and go on to our next stop – Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Yarmouth is only 200 km away from Lunenburg so it should not take us that long to get there. Well not really! It still took us many hours before we finally arrived at our camp site.

We had to make a few stops along the way of course and take some side roads in order for Leo to take some pictures and to find some further nice Maritimes scenery. One of the side roads was to Sable Island. This is the most southerly point in Nova Scotia. As we had been to the most northerly point in Meat Cove on Cape Breton, we only thought it proper to round out our list with Sable Island. The island itself is reached via a causeway, which was a relief because we did not see this road shown on MapQuest on the internet when we checked out this possible route. There it looked like Sable Island was not connected to Nova Scotia proper. But with the causeway in place, getting to the island was a breeze. However, as soon as we started upon this causeway we entered fog and it stayed for the full time we were on the island. At the most southerly point there is again a lighthouse (surprise, surprise), but you can not get directly to this as it is build on a small island separate from Sable Island itself. When we got there, we could not see anything of the lighthouse at all in the mist but we did hear its fog horn blowing so we know there was a lighthouse there.

We decided to stay at a campground just east of Yarmouth as it was supposed to have a working internet connection (not!). When we drove up we were greeted by lots of kids ‘hanging out’ around the barn and pool area. This again was a campground which also had a lot of seasonal trailers who park their units there all summer and use them as cottages essentially and as it was the last long weekend of summer every one was out to enjoy it. Every campsite was occupied and there were at least 230 of them. The campground also had ‘special’ programs planned for the weekend, and for that Saturday they had a hay ride for the kids with the wagon going around twice, both times filled with lots of kids and others riding behind it on their bikes. There were ice cream specials and an adult dance which started at 10 pm. We were told that most people don’t show up until 10:30/11:00 pm for the dance, and you guessed it: the dance went on until the early morning hours. By 3 o’clock in the morning we could still hear the people talking around the fires at their campsites. Luckily for us it then began to rain so the remaining partying was soon over. However, we still did not get much sleep as the rain then kept us awake.

In the early evening we did some sight-seeing around Yarmouth harbour and I must say that after seeing Lunenburg, Yarmouth just did not impress us that much. Nor in fact did the whole trip from Lunenburg to Yarmouth impress us. Having seen this once, we would not see a need to repeat it in future, whereas Lunenburg we would gladly revisit.

Leo did not take too many pictures but a few he did take can be found here.