Lovely Lunenburg

Lunenburg is a picturesque little tourist destination in Nova Scotia not far from Halifax. Dan, Amy, Kevin and I went there after Peggy's Cove. We happened to pick a day when no cruise tours were in town and it was late afternoon when we got there so we almost had the whole town to ourselves! It's a very pretty little place with boats of various types and sizes scattered about in the harbour, which reminds me of old drawings I've seen. Because as a landlocked prairie girl who is more familiar with lake country than oceanside communities, I couldn't figure out why the boats weren't all tied properly to docks instead of left way out there in the water. And then someone explained tides to me. Ahhhh. Now I get it.

There were some very cute houses, many of them made into shops or restaurants. The detailing on some of the Victorian style houses is beautifully done. And I loved the bold colours of some of the buildings. Thank you, world, for people who use bold colours and who do things in ways that I mostly don't!

Sailors, it seems, sometimes use rope the size of which I've never seen on a prairie farm! Scroll down to see a pile of ginormous rope! If you made a rope rug out of that you would need a handrail on the edge just to step up onto it!

Those marble columns beside the red buildings commemorate lives of local people lost at sea. So many names over the years and so many with the same last names.

Shortly after we arrived in Lunenburg, Dan somehow got separated from the rest of us. Kevin went to look for him leaving Amy and I ... and our credit cards ... to look through the many lovely little shops on our own. Tee hee! As it was, Kevin was the only one with a charged cell phone on his person so that didn't do us much good in terms of finding each other. But eventually eagle-eyed Amy found them both! She claims it had nothing to do with her "eagle eyes". She used simple logic. Whatever it was, we found them and joined them for drinks on a deck overlooking the harbour.

Lunenburg is very pretty. It's true. But it's very different than Peggy's Cove. Peggy's Cove doesn't appear to be prettified in any way. It's more stark. More rugged. More rustic. Less conventionally pretty. And smaller. I have to say I really fell in love with Peggy's Cove. It felt like a lovely place for one's soul and I could have spent the day there just soaking it up. The peace and, despite the tourists, the sense of solitude it somehow maintains is so appealing. It's one of the first times I have ever truly felt any "lure of the sea". It's how I imagined I might feel if I were to ever set foot in Ireland.