Facts:
| Mileage: | 174 Brooklin to Middleton, 409 trip total |
| Weather: | Morning fog, mostly sunny afternoon |
| Music: | The Sundays , The Sundays Tragic Kingdom , No Doubt B52s , B52s |
The Plan:
Arrive in Yarmouth at 11:30. Drive Evangeline T. to Annapolis Royal Historic Gardens. Roses should be spectacular. Drive to Middleton, Mt. Hanley Inn, settle in & dinner at Fairy Taylor's Tea Garden . Nope, open 7/1!. Looks like Mt.Hanley for a good & easy dinner.
Reality: Off to Nova Scotia
In bed by midnight, awake at 4:20 am. The birds are more numerous and louder here. What a beautiful 1st SUMMER morning.
A fast ride on "The Cat" the new high speed ferry to Yarmouth. Not your typical boat, the structure is almost entirely aluminum. Four huge water jets propel it forward. Traveling across the Gulf of Maine/ Bay of Fundy at 50 miles per hour, it's a wet and windy ride on what little outside deck there is. The trip is short enough that Rosanne and I were able to tolerate being forced to listen to "The Little Mermaid '' video being shown in the rear seating area for the young travelers.
Arrive in Yarmouth and pass through customs by noon (Atlantc time). We decide we are too hungry to wait to eat in Annapolis Royal, opt for Joshua's a short ways down on Water St., snap a photo of the ferry, grab lunch with our newly exchanged currency. (Banks closed, but Yarmouth visitor / tourism center is open).
Our next major decision is which road to take to our first planned point of interest, the Annapolis Royal Historic Gardens. We are both feeling weary, we know the slow way (Trunk hwy 1) is scenic and has many side roads to lure us off course and eat up the time we want to spend elsewhere. Rather than give in to rambling, we get onto Provincial Highway 101-ZOOM, besides, Edna's Bakery will be closed, source of the best darn ginger snap cookies we have ever eaten. For this reason, we crank some rock-n-roll and fast route it, also thinking we'd like to avoid any ''Fundy-Fog'' commonly chilling the scenic coastal route.
Freewheelin' 101 ended abruptly and became a local road, something Canadian highways do here. We found ourselves at Gilbert's Cove, a teeny community where we entertained a thought about buying a cottage five years ago-When we returned again in '96, the $5,000. price tag was gone and someone had made it cozy. Dreams...
The final leg of our journey today, took us through the Annapolis Valley farmland. Dave says it reminds him of the farms near Albany, NY. Stopped in at the Middleton Visitors Information Center and got everything we needed- including a point in the direction on the famous Chimney Swift Chimney- home to over 400 little birds who fly into it each summer night to roost.
Can't recommend these visitor centers enough when you need any piece of info or even a reservation- if one of the staff can't answer, he/she will find someone who can . We found our roost,the Mt. Hanley Austria Inn much as we had left it five years ago- very clean, well appointed, private and quiet. Late day sun filling our room. Reserved out table for some German cooking. The end. zzzzzzzzzz
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Photo of the day
We were just two strangers in Paradise
Note the golden rays shining down.