Road Tripping From Nova Scotia To New Brunswick, Canada

Leaving the pretty little town of Lunenburg, we made our way over to Wolfville, which is where we would pitch our tent for the night (figuratively speaking, of course) at The Blomidon Inn.

The Blomidon Inn is another one of Nova Scotia’s historic hotels and is just the perfect picturesque hotel to finish up a day spent exploring.

Let me show you around the rooms…

Settled in, we headed over to the hotel’s restaurant, unsurprisingly called the Blomidon Inn Restaurant, for dinner.

Salmon for Lloyd and Lobster pasta for me (okay, spoiler alert – I’m pretty sure I ate lobster at every opportunity possible on this trip – see this part of Canada is known for lobster and I had every intention on indulging at every moment possible!).

Dessert came in the form of summer cobbler for Lloyd and crème brulee for myself, with a spot of tea to round things off.

With that, we hit the hay, chuffed about all the beautiful quaint bits of Nova Scotia we got to explore today that perhaps we wouldn’t even have thought about a mere few months ago. 😀

The next day in Wolfville, we got up bright and early for breakfast, but also to sneak in a quick jaunt around the town.

Later that morning, bags packed, we hopped into the car and made our way over to our final stop in Nova Scotia, leaving for New Brunswick – Hall’s Harbour Lobster Pound.

Like I said earlier, one of my main goals here was to eat as much lobster as possible and they don’t come much fresher than here at Hall’s Harbour.

You select your lobster (based on weight categories) and while you wait for your lobster to be prepared, you can wander around the area.

After a quick walk on the beach (chased by in by the incoming rain), we popped back in where we got to find out more about Hall’s Harbour.

See back in the day, this area was almost over-run by lobster, so much so that after huge storms, the lobsters would wash up on the beach.

There was so much lobster here that the prison warden in the areas, in a bit to stretch the food budgets, used to feed the prisoners lobsters.

The prisoners ate so much lobster that they actually ended up making complaints about how terrible it was that they were forced to eat so much lobster. (Ironic now seeing how expensive lobster can be on menus compared to say beef or chicken – funnily enough, a similar thing – sans prisoners, happened in Spain too where lobster was seen as peasant food and chicken as a treat reserved only for the rich and famous).

We got to find out so much more about lobster while we were here, including how to tell the difference between the genders, the differences in their claws (I just always assumed they were the same thing – turns out one’s for pinching and one for grinding), what they eat and a whole lot more.

Then we got on to the main event, our freshly cooked lobster with fries and garlic butter (plus, of course, a guilt-reducing salad 😉 ).

We finished things off with a coconut cream pie for myself and lemon meringue for Lloyd.

With that, we bade Nova Scotia farewell and made our way up North over to New Brunswick.

Actually, I know Hall’s Harbour was technically supposed to be our last stop in Nova Scotia but there was a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the way over that everyone recommended we visit and that was Grand Pre.

Grand Pre was founded in 1680 by the Acadians (they’re essentially French folk who settled in North America) and was something of a hard to farm marshland. The Acadians had specific dyke-building techniques to help them transform the land into quite productive agricultural land and is seen as a brilliant example of European adaptation to new lands in the North American Atlantic Coast.

Their history is not a rosy one though. The land settled by the Acadians was actually never in use for agriculture so it apparently didn’t really create any real clashes with the Mi’kmaq (the Indigenous First Nations) and so they lived in relative harmony (some of them even had babies together). It was the arrival of the Brits that changed things here.

The British colonists basically arrived, destroyed so much of what was built by the Acadians here and eventually exiled them. The Mi’kmaq and the Acadians formed a resistance ‘army’ to fight off the British colonists but eventually lost and after a rather tumultuous period, were kicked out by the Brits.

In recent times, the present-day Queen Elizabeth acknowledge the wrongs committed in Acadia and how there’s a day for commemorating the loss the Acadians and Mi’kmaq faced at the hands of the British colonist troops.

Leaving Grand Pre, we arrived in Moncton (the largest city in New Brunswick) a little later than expected and quickly chucked our things into the hotel room before making our way over to Les Brumes Des Coudes for dinner.

I started things off with a much-welcome cocktail – red wine for Lloyd, before tucking into some delicious salmon and scallops!

For dessert – we went for a pie (can’t remember which exactly, except that it was quite nutty – almost mix of a pecan pie and a Victoria sponge).

The meal, by the way, was absolutely amazing here! Every single bit and sip was just absolutely perfect and the most brilliant way to finish off a day exploring and traipsing across two of Canada’s Atlantic provinces.