Nova Scotia

Clouds, leaden, black, heavy with rain, shafts of gold streaking through, being at sea can provide one with some great photo opps, but those same beautiful scenes can portend cancelled ports of call as this one foretold our not stopping at Prince Edward Island thus missing eating Prince Edward Island mussels at the source.

For the third time, during two cruises on the Caribbean Princess, we were awakened by the Captain at 6:00AM, with an announcement that gale force winds would mean canceling a stop, just as they had for Dublin and also kept us glued to the dock for twelve hours in Reykjavik, Iceland almost causing us to miss Greenland.

On the other hand, since we were missing a day on land, there is more time to write and to try to pick the best shots of our time in Nova Scotia, which happens to be quite a beautiful place.

There were four cruise ships in Halifax when we arrived and we were quite happy to get away from most of the crowds and head out on our own. Most of the tours were quite long and we didn’t think John would be up for six or seven hours on a bus, so we rented a car and off we went.

On our way to our first stop and shortly out of Halifax, we entered a heavily forested area dotted with many lakes and our first taste of great fall colors.

We continued on toward Peggy's Cove and Peggy Lighthouse enjoying the scenery and frankly the freedom of having our own car, which became readily apparent as soon as we turned off of the highway towards the Cove and into a tourist bus traffic jam.

There is one road in and out and probably no more than twelve houses in the town and all were overrun, but the place was undeniably picturesque. So we turned around and left to come back later when the crowds were gone.

The myth is that after a shipwreck a little girl, the only survivor, was washed ashore and did not know her name. The townspeople named her Peggy and later Peggy's Cove became this little town's name. What I find fascinating is that this town has been here since 1776.

Not only is the town a magnet for photographers, but the entire area around it is fascinating and beautiful.

As we continued our drive on the coast, we came across the memorial site for Swissair 111.

I had forgotten about it, but Kathy remembered. It is a stone's throw from Peggy's Cove. Unfortunately, all 229 aboard the flight perished.

We continued our picturesque drive past many little coves and very small villages each one worth a camera stop. The common theme, besides beauty, was that each seemed to support a small amount of lobster fishermen and when we finally stopped for lunch, we celebrated with three fantastic lobster rolls, in a tidy little restaurant overlooking the Atlantic. We were so satisfied with our find and lunch, none of us took a picture, but the following shots will give you an idea of the area.

It was starting to get late and we needed to head back to Halifax. What a lovely day we had and we had another port in this beautiful province to look forward to, Sydney.

This charming little town was settled by the British in 1765. It is on Cape Breton Island and today is known as the Fiddle Capital of the World and also boasts the World's Largest Violin.

This is all fitting that Cape Breton and Sydney are truly proud of their Scottish, Arcadian and Irish heritage and the music it has produced. Cape Breton is also home to the Cabot Trail, a stunningly beautiful drive along the coast, which, unfortunately, we passed on do the length of the tours and lack of any rental companies open on Sunday. We also thought that John would be done with touring by now, but he wasn't and kept asking why we were just walking around. Frankly, Sydney, while exceedingly pleasant is pretty dead.

We ended up passing a pleasant amount of time in a pub listening to a fiddle player of some renown, I forget his name, and eating the most delicious poutine yet, this one topped with pulled pork. 

We really liked Nova Scotia and from what we saw from the real estate listings, one could have a beautiful lake or ocean front property at a really reasonable price, but after walking around Sydney all day and listing to the clickity-clack of studded tires and seeing this sign, I thought the better of it.

Wow, those winters must really be rough.

Portland, Poutine and Provinces

Food always plays an important part in our travels and on this cruise it’s even more important. While never having been to Portland, we’ve been to some pretty amazing places in Coastal Maine and one look at the tours that were offered made finding the best lobster roll in the city a priority. Somehow a day at the outlets or the L.L. Bean Factory store didn’t seem that interesting.

Fortunately Portland has been gaining in reputation as a foodie destination. Many of the top destinations are open only for dinner, but we wanted an authentic lobster roll experience and we got it at the Portland Lobster Company.

Located outside on the docks, we sat at the bar and ordered fried clams, two lobster rolls and a crab sandwich. The place was bustling, but the staff couldn’t have been friendlier. After a short wait, what you see is what arrived.

 It could not have been fresher or better. You can have lobster flown in live pretty much anywhere, but sitting on the docks, smelling the sea, listening to music, and eating sweet lobster that was caught that morning, barely dressed, and overflowing on a buttered roll, is pure heaven and pretty much all you need to do in Portland. By the way, the clams and the crab cake were excellent as well.

We hated to leave our perches at the bar, but were too full to have the fresh Maine blueberry pie and we did want to see the harbor area and had booked a city tour on a fire engine from an interesting character on the docks, so we reluctantly left.

The harbor area is pretty non-descript with the usual sprinkling of shops and restaurants, but not nearly as overtly commercial as Newport. The tour was laid back and fun. Not visually stimulating, but certainly Portland has a lot of history although except for the food scene and outlets, I am not sure what else it offers. Perhaps it’s the exceptional views from ocean front homes and most likely a very nice lifestyle, at least in the summer.

We headed out of Portland toward the Bay of Fundy and St. John, New Brunswick, Canada. Our first stop in the Maritime Provinces. Here we were to see the magical reversing rapids caused by fifty-foot tides and had booked a boat tour to see the spectacle. Well, we hit the rapids at slack tide when nothing happens. The river was as smooth as glass. As they say, timing is everything and by the way, their tides are only twenty-six feet. The fifty foot ones are one hundred miles up river.

Something magical did happen in St. John, we had our first poutine. Now French fries, brown gravy and cheese curds doesn’t sound too appetizing, but at Billy’s Seafood they made their poutine with lobster and a light gravy similar to a béchamel sauce. It was fantastic. Filling, but fantastic. What an introduction to a dish first made by the peasants in Quebec sans the lobster.  One has to wonder why the good folks in Wisconsin didn’t invent this particular dish, given all the cheese curds they produce.

Now I must explain the green stuff on top of the poutine. The folks in New Brunswick have a strong affinity for Dulse, which is air-dried seaweed. They eat it all the time and put it on just about everything. They claim this particular seaweed is only found in the waters off New Brunswick and that they are famous for it. Let’s just say it is an acquired taste. Ours was pretty much left intact after a taste, much to the astonishment of our incredibly cheerful waitress.

That cheerfulness is another trait one quickly picks up on. Everyone we met was so nice. Maybe it’s all of the Dulse, but people here seem incredibly nice and friendly, even passersby on the streets.

It certainly is a clean and tidy city with a great Oceanographic Museum, the oldest farmer’s market in Canada, fantastic public art, nice parks and the reversing rapids, but the Downtown area seems a little too quiet for our tastes, but we will always remember it for our first poutine.

Our next stop was Halifax, Nova Scotia where we rented a car and took off for the coast and Peggy’s Cove. We were rewarded with beautiful scenery, fall colors, a magnificent coast, and more great food, this time lobster rolls, in a quaint little restaurant overlooking the Atlantic, but I have so many great shots to choose from, I've decided to do a separate post.

On the Caribbean Princess

Last March I wrote a teaser to all of you about our upcoming river cruise from Amsterdam to Zurich. It was to be a wine oriented cruise lead by the well known wine maker Ed Sbragia on our favorite river cruise line AMA. We flew to Amsterdam for some pre-cruise festivities, checked into our beautiful hotel, and were upgraded to the Louis XIV suite. We dropped our bags in the foyer of the suite, said wow and then promptly zipped out the door, boarded a tram and headed for the largest outdoor street market in Europe and directly into a downpour. That downpour was to be the best weather we had on the trip until we reached Zurich twelve days later.

From that Amsterdam market until we arrived in Zurich, we experienced wind driven, horizontal rain, torrential rain, freezing rain, plain old continuous rain, sleet, snow, cold, white caps on the Rhine and total lack of sun. Not only that, part of the trip was over Easter weekend. As secular as Europe is they still celebrate Easter with zeal, not by going to church, but by closing everything from Friday to Monday and taking a holiday. No shops, no museums, few restaurants were open and few people were on the streets. The cities were deserted.

To make up for the weather, lack of cultural diversions, and general malaise of the trip, we thoroughly enjoyed every drop of wine poured by the Sbragia’s and food prepared by the ship’s chef. It did not lend itself to creative writing pursuits.

Today, I am writing from the Caribbean Princess as we sail out of the harbor at St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, into the Bay of Fundy on our way to Halifax, Nova Scotia. We’ve always wanted to do an East Coast to Canada trip and with our travel consisting of many short trips in the US this year, we booked ourselves and John on this one hoping to see some fall foliage, the Maritime Provinces of Canada, and to revisit Quebec City and Montreal.

We have never sailed out of Bayonne and thus we had high hopes of seeing the Manhattan Skyline at night, sailing past the Statue of Liberty and a well lit lower Manhattan, before gliding under the Verrazano Bridge into the Atlantic. It turns out, however, that Bayonne’s Harbor is located well past mid-town Manhattan and to the right of the Statue of Liberty, so all the ship needs to do is turn right and head toward the Verrazano Bridge: no passing by the magnificent Manhattan Skyline. I was able to get some good shots from our stateroom, but that was it.

While Bayonne was a slight disappointment, our good friend Baxter Graham took us for lunch that afternoon at his newly renovated club Canoe Brook. We’d spent many a happy evening there with Baxter and his wife Carol, she was in London this time, when we lived in Summit, and there are few things more pleasurable than catching up with longtime friend and the old place looked spectacular, especially on a bright, sunny, fresh fall day. It made us a little homesick for Summit, until Kathy reminded us that days like we were experiencing were rare in New Jersey.

Our first stop was Newport, Rhode Island. Known primarily as a repository for some of America’s finest mansions from the “Gilded Age” as well as it’s fine harbor, serendipity struck and after we toured the Vanderbilt Mansion, the Breakers, we were treated to real Americana by literally running into Newport’s Columbus Day parade. The Mansion was an architectural masterpiece, sadly no interior pictures allowed, but the parade told the story of what makes this country so great: local people proudly celebrating their heritage and local pride.

 

We watched the parade until the fire trucks arrived and then rushed away to meet our friends Tina and Milton for lunch and our first “chowda” and lobster of the trip. Tina and Milton are lucky enough to live half the year on a neighboring island and when not in Rhode Island, they live in Scottsdale. Unlike seeing Baxter for the first time in almost a decade, it’s only been months since we broke bread with the Richard’s, but time doesn’t matter and friendship does. It was great catching up, getting local information and looking forward to good times when they return to Arizona.

Friends also played an important part in our next stop, Boston. Having loved the Italian food in the North End, we asked Paul and Patti LaPierriere for a recommendation and they said Tratorria Il Pannino. It was fabulous and I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. The first is the lasagna I had and the second the mushroom ravioli’s Kathy ordered. John dove into his tortellini so quickly we couldn’t take a picture. Then we went to Mike’s Pastry shop for cannolis. Twenty-eight varieties are made daily along with many other Italian pastries. I had an amaretto one. Again, the picture speaks for itself. (In case you are wondering, eating will play an important part of this trip. Exotic ports and new cultures are not on the schedule.)

After a thoroughly satisfying lunch, we walked some of it off by going to the Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market area and then headed for our scheduled Duck Tour. Frankly, while packed with history, I don’t find Boston an aesthetically pleasing or a particularly photogenic town. It’s dark and filled with lots of squat buildings on narrow streets. There is little of architectural interest unless you are into the Federalist style. San Francisco it’s not. The highlight of the Duck Tour was John getting to drive the Duck Boat, otherwise it was constant narration, but then we became stuck in one of Boston’s famous traffic jams and did not move an inch for over half an hour.

The window of time I had given us to return to the ship was quickly closing and we were miles away and no traffic was moving in any direction. The Duck driver was kind enough to somehow maneuver over to the curb to let us off and we started walking as fast as we could to the ship.

As the clock ticked, the traffic stood gridlocked in all directions and we, despite the best intentions of Siri, became disoriented as we walked toward where we thought the ship was, and a little angst began to settle in.

As we started crossing a bridge, we yelled over to a cab driver asking if we were going in the right direction, but he thought we were hailing him. Somehow he managed to make a U-turn on the crowded bridge and we then felt obligated to get in, but first we had to climb over the barrier separating the sidewalk from the road. John made it over easily, but Kathy and I had to sit on the top of it and swing over. It must have made quite a sight for the gridlocked drivers.

Thanks to the driver we made it with time to spare and after all the commotion, we were heading in the right direction, but we did get one last surprise. Our backsides were covered with a thick coating of a vile mixture of black grease that had formed on that bridge girder for who knows who long. I worked on my jeans for an hour to get it out, Kathy’s ended up in the trash.

Boston had the last laugh….