Rob-n-Hild, Eastward Ho!

Click links to jump to specific days: Start | Nerdy | Largest | Stranger Things | Stairs Stairs Stairs

May 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Jun 01 02 03 04

05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Jul 01 02 03 04 05 06

Dartmouth - Yarmouth 310 km. 3:31 hours. Elevation maximum 125 metres

After a great four days in Dartmouth, today we drove to Yarmouth on the South-West coast of Nova Scotia. We are here for a few days, with some work to be done as well as some sight-seeing before we leave Nova Scotia for New Brunswick.

Today, we drove past Chester and stopped in Liverpool for lunch beside the river Mersey. Those words might sound somewhat familiar to anyone who knows the UK, but Rob can assure you that this is not the river Mersey (or the Liverpool) he remembers! Liverpool, Nova Scotia, is a ship-building port made famous in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by its "Privateers" - basically pirates who were careful to only attack French, Spanish amd American ships, leaving British ships alone! Hild found a nice park with picnic tables for lunch, but when we saw chairs at the river bank, we had to eat there beside the river. There was even a statue of a Canadian boxing champion from Liverpool (this Liverpool) called Terence "Tiger" Warrington!

As we mentioned the other day, we had postponed this part of the trip because of forest fires a week or so ago and there was a big one around Barrington Lakes - which is where were driving through. At 240 sq km this is the largest forest fire recorded in Nova Scotia and a lot of property was damaged. We didn't see any damaged buildings from the road and the damage we saw wasn't too bad, but the smell of smoke was still there.

What we really came to Barrington for was the Woollen Mill Museum. Hild read about this in a book that Norah had loaned us - which is from 1979 and many of the things mentioned are not there anymore. So when Hild saw about an old water-driven woollen mill, we didn't really think it would still be open so she checked it out online (thank you Snus) as we drove along. Well, the museum is still open and seems to be thriving with staff not just showing visitors around, but working on producing yarn and cloth from local wool! Hild finds anything to do with sheep fascinating and she also has - some - first hand experience of carding a spinning so it was very interesting to see the machinery that was in use up to 1954 driven by a water- wheel. The big carding machines were special - and still had bits of wool stuck to them - and the spinning mule was about 6 meters wide! They had a film made when the mill was still in operation and to see it in operation was great. However, I doubt it would pass Health and Safety at Work rules anymore - with some very big moving parts all wide open! Norah's book had a picture of a big woollen mural at the museum, which is apparently still there (according to the web), but we were so busy chatting with the staff about where their wool comes from, how they are trying to dye the wool using lupin flowers(!), how the looms work etc., that we clean forgot to ask about the mural! Oops.

And now we are nicely set up in our standard Comfort Inn ground floor room in Yarmouth. We have been using this hotel chain a lot this trip and we are getting used to the rooms now. We pay a bit extra for a ground floor room with a sliding door out to the car so we don't have to lug all our stuff up stairs. We set the room up as soon as we get there: Replace the hotel coffee-maker with our kettle; Move the desk away from the wall so that we have a wall behind us for online meetings; Stand our monitor up on ice-buckets (sometimes we use the recycling container); and plug in our extension cables to get enough power outlets for everything!

Coming up: Yarmouth

Back | Top of page | Forward