Sunny South Shore

8' C and no wind - huge improvement! Off we drove to the South Shore past Peggy's Cove to a private garden at Mahone Bay where our hostess has been gardening for 20 years. She belongs to the Rhododendron Society and has access to rare plants which she tends lovingly on a very steep slope.

Then on to Lunenberg which has Unesco World Heritage status for its pretty and well-preserved houses on very steep streets rolling down to the water front and working shipyards.
We went to the Maritime Museum where our guide was a fisherman's wife and descendant from the original settlers who came from Germany and Switzerland to take up fishing with no prior experience. It's a fascinating story and who'd have thought a fishing museum could be so interesting.

Merryle arranged for us to visit Laurie Swim's studio where she displays her silk quilts: they are art rather than craft and her latest one sold for $60,000. Absolutely beautiful, they depict local scenes especially fishing and she is so clever at depicting water - sometimes with silver material and sometimes with stitching. They are hand-pieced and free-form machine quilted. (No photos allowed due to copyright.)

Back we went to Mahone Bay which is having a scarecrow festival: houses and shops decorated for Canadian Thanksgiving on Monday, pumpkins everywhere and cute scarecrows including the Royal Wedding. And really good shops! Even the guys had to admit the shops were good, especially Amos Pewter which is made there. I loved the wool shop called Have a Yarn and award it the prize for best sheep knitting scarecrow. I bought some lovely yarn there. Nova Scotians are great craft people - something to do with those long cold winters - and today we saw rug hooking which is making a comeback and men are doing it. I'd like to see more of that.

Tonight was our special dinner that we'd paid for two months ago. 24 of us went, in 6 taxis, to Stories where we had a lovely set menu of scallops ( again - the nearly local scallops from Digby are justly famous - but they serve them without the roe which is a shame) and strip loin grass-fed beef which was good but ours us better then a trio of delicious desserts, just two mouthfuls in each. Picture is if the scallops done in rice paper with a basket of salad in the middle: it's their signature dish.