Discover the treasures at home

The month of June makes me grumpy. Experience has taught me that all too often the hours after supper will be filled with annual meetings just when the weather is finally nice enough to be in the garden. Evenings grow long and the air is softly scented and I have to be indoors with a bunch of other people who’d also rather be elsewhere. It ain’t fair, but it does seem to be inevitable.

So, when a visitor from away offered us distraction one recent weekend, we jumped at the chance to visit the southwest end of the province.

Our mini-vacation started out with stops at two Guy’s Frenchies in Liverpool and Shelburne. They were profitable stops too, if you don't mind finding your new winter clothes at the launch of summer.

We had not been to Shelburne in 33 years, but the town retains an authentic feel as if nothing had changed in three times that long. The Ross-Thomson house was worth a viewing, as are most of the Nova Scotia Museum sites. I was fascinated having just read Lawrence Hill’s award winning novel, The Book of Negroes, which is partially set in Loyalist Shelburne.

The 100-series highways were lined by swaths of white hawthorn and tri-coloured lupins. Usually dead boring for travellers, the main highways in June are suddenly colorful. Apple trees near Barrington were blooming a full two weeks after ours in the Valley.

Discovered small communities

Our hosts had never heard the hermit thrush calling near their beach, but we were entranced to hear a pair of the silvery-throated birds. And there were piping plovers running about at Sand Hills provincial park. The sunset over the beach was spectacular.

On Sunday, we set out to visit the most southern-most part of the province and discovered about a thousand people living way down in Clark’s Harbour on Cape Sable Island.

My fellow columnist Laurent d’Entremont has invited us for years to visit the Pubnicos, another unknown population centre, so we did.

Getting a ride around the community of Lower West Pubnico in his 1920 Ford Woody wagon was great fun.

Laurent took us to see the wind farm, which has grown 17 windmills. We toured the Le village historique acadien de la Nouvelle-Écosse, which is on a beautiful 17-acre site overlooking Pubnico harbour. There we learned how to make a lobster plug.

We toured a dear little house where 13 kids, two parents and two aunts used to live. People must have been a lot smaller in the good old days for 17 people to co-exist in one house.

Feel like a guest

En route home, we managed to find a restaurant we’ve wanted to check out for years. Chez Christophe in Grosse Coques is listed year after year in Where to Eat in Canada. Chef Paul Comeau apparently opened his restaurant in the house where his grandfather Christophe Dugas lived.

It’s a small, old-fashioned farmhouse, so you feel like a guest in someone’s home. Customers often bring their own wine and always eat simple, perfectly cooked food. We were delighted with his rappie pie, chock full of tender clams.

All in all it was wonderful to get away for a June weekend. We spent a tank and a half of gas and felt like we’d been tourists on our home turf. Given the rising cost of airfare, a mini-vacation right in Nova Scotia is good for the provincial economy and our wallets. We recommend trying it.

Postscript:

Driving through New Minas these days there is a lot of earth moving going on at the site of the new Home Depot store. Although it is not required in the store’s development agreement, I'm hoping that some of the mature shade trees on the former farm property will survive the building process. The village has too few patches of greenery along Commercial Street and even big box store developers ought to take the survival of well-established trees into account. Here’s hoping anyway...