Any day that starts with cooking sausage and eggs and brewing coffee along the shore of the ocean is a good day.  This one just kept getting better. From Port Dufferin down the coast to Halifax (carefully avoiding Sober Island) is a series of angular bays and fingers that completely fry your sense of direction as the North Atlantic looms on one side of the road AND the other, and the fjord-like clefts in the shoreline angle south and west or south and east depending on where you are along their wrinkled backs.

As a coastline, Nova Scotia hits all the buttons.  I won’t say you can’t get this in some sections of Northern Maine, or along the north Pacific coast, but you can’t get it in this consistency and abundance.  It just keeps going and going.  Around Halifax it changes a bit, the rocks get rounder and whiter and the landscape gets plumper and less sharp.  This is also, alas, where the people are. St Magarets, Mahone, and Lunenburg Bays are apparently on all the lists, which of course they should be, just not today. While Lunenburg is a UNESCO World Heritage site, I thought Mahone Bay was a more interesting town.  None of the settlement could match the terrain, of course, so it’s a drive for soaking in and appreciating more than learning.

We camped on Lunenburg Bay, directly south across the bay from the town of Lunenburg.  For the first time since we got here, the bugs were out.  After a day of 78 degrees its like they all hatched at once.  Big enough to harness a plow to and thick enough to blur the lights of Lunenburg, the damn things had us windmilling through the entire cocktail hour.  Fortunately, as the evening cooled, so did they.

Tomorrow we exit Nova Scotia stage left, or right, or however those directions work — we are taking the ferry from Digby to St. John New Brunswick across the Bay of Fundy.  I’m not looking forward to leaving Nova Scotia, I am looking forward to a ride on the largest tide in the world, and I’m anxious to get some time away from this place to help me get it in a better frame.  The journey, each little step of it, continues.