Thursday, July 23 - Annapolis Royal

After a nice breakfast at Garrison House, we headed downriver to the Port Royal Historical Site.  This is a reconstruction of Sieur de Monts and Samuel Champlain's fur-trading post.  I've heard of Champlain but not this de Monts fellow.  Turns out de Monts was the head guy--Champlain was merely his hired cartographer.  But Champlain has gotten all the publicity.  The French, under de Monts set up shop in port Royal in 1605--two years before Jamestown.

But then eight years later, when all the Frenchmen in the post had gone across the river to help with the wheat harvest, a ship full of Brits from Jamestown came, found no one at home, stole everything in the post and then burned it down!  The local Indians saved them from starvation until help came from France.

Now Canada has built this great replica.  G says this is the best historical site we've seen on this trip.  We found a couple of red Adirondack chairs overlooking the Bay.  Great place to eat our picnic lunch and chat with other visitors--most of them from farther west in Canada.  We see very few Americans.

Then we drove a ways down the peninsula and hiked to a pretty waterfall.  Delaps Cove Wilderness Trail.

When we got back to town we stopped at the Tidal Generating Station.  Western Nova Scotia is located on the Bay of Fundy, home of the world's most extreme tides.  They can rise 50 feet!  So it's a good place for generating electricity from the tides.  G can tell you all about it. Ask him sometime.

Back home we stopped at the grocery store and bought veggies and fruit for supper.  And now I'm sitting by the second floor landing because there's no wifi on the third floor in our room.  There are two chairs here in this nook so one of the second floor ladies stopped to chat.  She's about my age, traveling with two friends.  They are from Ottawa.

We had such cute teapots at breakfast:

Here is a picture of the Port Royal post: