The Maritimes I: Halifax and the Eastern Shore

 It was my first lobster, of at least six or eight I downed on Dave's and my trip during August 2018 to the Canadian Maritime Provinces.  Nova Scotia is one of the main exporters of lobster to the world, with the finest specimens particularly prized in Japan and China.  I love food, and my very favorite food is lobster.  I was in heaven.

 Dave and I arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at midnight on August 8, 2018.  The next morning we drove southeast, along the rocky coast of Nova Scotia, to visit Lunenburg, a UNESCO Heritage Site. After the English pushed the French out of Nova Scotia during the mid-1700s, they brought in other ethnic groups, such as the Germans who settled Lunenburg.  In the days before fishing crashed on the Great Banks, Lunenburg was a fishing hub, as well as a shipbuilding center for wooden clipper ships.

Lunenburg is a picturesque town, with steep hills leading down to the pier and brightly colored houses on those steep streets.

Lunenburg's Fisheries Museum is one of the highlights of the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia.

There were displays on bootlegging during America's Prohibition of the 1920s.  Bootleggers loaded up on liquor at the French island of St. Pierre, where alcohol was legal, and in Canada, where each province set different rules, and smuggled it to Boston, where it was illegal.

The museum had models of the ships that were built in Lunenburg and that crashed on the rocky shoals around its coast.

The "Maritime Provinces" of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland are well-named.  Almost everything about them centers on the sea.

Lunenburg was picturesque, but not as starkly beautiful as we remembered Peggy's Cove being, from our last trip there in 2009.  We stopped by Peggy's Cove on our drive back to Halifax.  It was a foggy afternoon, which set the perfect ambience for this picture perfect fishing village.  Somehow we managed to get photographs that excluded all the tourists!

We attended the 7 p.m. session at the Halifax Temple, one of the very first small temples.  We especially enjoyed talking with the temple workers.  One of them told the story of President Hinckley telling local leaders, when he approved the temple, "The numbers don't make sense to place a temple here in Eastern Canada, but we're giving you one anyway."