Valleyview Prov Park to Whale Cove cg NS

19C and foggy at 8am.We washed up in the van, made our coffee, and were away. We stopped for a good breakfast in Annapolis Royal, right across the road from Fort Anne, then had a good walking tour of the Fort. A very leisurely walk though, as the air is heavy and humid this morning.

This was an amazing stone wall, a breakwater likely

Then we toured the Tidal Power Interpretive Center, a demo plant in operation since the 1980’s.

We were told how well this demo has worked, but the requirement for a dam has meant that the design does not work in other parts of Fundy, as the water is usually so heavily silted it quickly fouls the dams. Several have been built around NS, and have failed. The focus now seems to be on a type of underwater windmill that’s turned by the passing tides.

Cathie toured the Historic Gardens that are also in town, and thought it was a beautiful place.

We drove out to Bear River, which used to be a lovely crafty area. Not much there now except a high-quality (and pricey) artist co-op. The picturesque windmill that was there on our visit some 40 years ago had long since rotted away.

So we pressed on, out #217 to Digby Neck, and stopped at Whale Cove cg. There is not much organized camping on Digby Neck, although I suspect boondocking is common.

Whale Cove is nice though, well serviced, complete with a seafood takeout right on the grounds that did a very nice job with scallops etc. We took site 16, $46 for 2 nights, with water/electric. The unserviced sites really were tent sites, and most were inaccessible to the van due to overhead limb clearance. Very reasonable price for what we got, but I think they gave us the unserviced price, since that was what we had requested but couldn’t use.

We got to the cg quite early in the day, about 3pm, and lazed around for the rest of the drizzly day. We got lobster rolls at the takeout for a late lunch, very good.

Large rosehips, common along the coast right now

They look a lot like radishes

We found out that a lot of the more open tent sites were taken by a group from Dalhousie Uni, camped here while going out to sea each day for some type of whale research.

Later on we both had showers to wash off the accumulated humidity, and had a walk down to a nearby wharf. One thing we saw a lot of this trip were wild rosebushes with huge rose hips, and even some lingering flowers. The plants made a great ground cover, very dense in places.
 
The wharf area itself wasn’t too active, but did have one of those signposts pointing off to civilization: 

Today's route: