Yarmouth Nova Scotia The city, which grew as a shipbuilding and shipping town, fell on hard times, most recently when ferry service to Maine ended. It is, however, somewhat recovering now that the ferry to Portland has recently been reinstated. It still has some distinguished buildings and a number of interesting Georgian and Italianate homes. […]
Canada
Shelburne and Birchtown Nova Scotia
Shelbourne, on Nova Scotia’s southeast coast, was an 18th- and 19th-century shipbuilding center that was founded in 1783. It grew to 10,000 people within a year, primarily due to British loyalists who fled America after the Revolution. It eventually grew larger than Montreal and Quebec before the British-run Canadian government stopped providing free land and […]
Lunenburg Nova Scotia and Makone Bay
The coastline of Makone Bay is is pretty as St. Margaret’s Bay (see previous post), its next-door neighbor. While the coast has a number of scenic coves, it also has two of the pretties towns on the province’s central coast. Mahone Bay The town of Mahone Bay is a pretty coastal town with many […]
Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia and Its Lighthouse
The drive from Louisbourg to Nova Scotia’s southern shore is no easy proposition. Although the scenic town of Peggy’s Cove (just south of Halifax) isn’t that far from Louisbourg as the crow flies, navigating it by car requires a very long (500 kilometer, 5 hour) drive. The only way to get from one town to […]
Louisbourg Nova Scotia and its Fortress
The town of Louisbourg is notable primarily as the 18th-century site of the largest (4,000 to 5,000 people on almost 15,000 acres) French military fortress and thriving fishing town on the Atlantic coast. (A fortress, as we learned is a military base that includes a town within its walls.) The Fortress of Louisbourg served as […]
The Towns of Cape Breton Island
The focus of our Cape Bretton trip was the Cabot Trail, the National Park and its trails. Towns, however, do make convenient evening and restaurant stops and sometimes have other attractions that can’t be found in nature. We stopped at three of the island’s primary towns. Cheticamp Cheticamp, a town at the Western entry to […]