Annapolis Royal,, Nova Scotia, is a lovely town but we got there so late, because we chatted with the Langlais family too long, so we resolved to return later. We only had time for one stop.

This was the amazing Annapolis Royal Historic Garden.  This is one of my favorite gardens in Canada and we stop here every time we are in the area. I love garden, but hate gardening.  I guess that means I am either very lazy, or morally corrupt, or both.

The flowers, particularly the roses, were lovely, even though it was late September. Life is good, in a garden. As long as you don’t have to work in it.

The beautiful gardens are found on a lovely setting overlooking a tidal river valley.  The gardens proudly showcase hundreds of rose cultivars and thousands of fragrant and beautiful blossoms.  I managed to catch a pollinator leaving a flower in a photograph. I always like to photograph the pollinators, but rarely catch them in flight. This was a rare and unexpected treat.

A single rose can be my garden; a single friend, my world” – Leo Buscaglia 

I even photographed a fallen leaf on a green grass. I liked how the image showed the recently fallen and not so recently fallen in a mirror image.

A beautiful garden in autumn. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said “The world laughs in Flowers.”  He as a wise man.

On the way home I stopped to photograph some trees starting to show the autumn colours. I love autumn. What’s not to like about it?

Albert Camus was another wise man. He said, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

Ocean Hillside B & B Digby Nova Scotia

Today we had one of the strangest experiences ever at a B & B.  We met a young couple from Rimouski, Quebec, where stayed for the night on the way here. They are Samuel and Naomi.  They explained that they were sailors.  What did that mean, we asked?  Does it mean they sail around the world in sail boats? Not at all. They sail on cargo ships mainly in and around Hudson Bay, but also the Great Lakes. They deliver supplies to people in the High Arctic. In fact, a CBC Gem film was made about such people, called High Arctic Crawlers. Each year they spend about 5 months at sea and the rest of the time back home. They work on separate ships by choice to ensure it is not difficult for others having a married couple on a ship.

We had a fascinating talk with them.  Life on the sea is incredibly interesting and challenging. They are both well versed in the arcane maritime laws that officers are expected to know. Even though they are much younger than us, we had great discussions on a variety of topics.  We spent hours sitting around the breakfast table talking rather than exploring. We have never done that before. We have always like staying at B & B’s on account of the interesting people to talk to, but this was special. It was a most congenial morning that stretched into lunch. At the end of the trip, someone asked me what was the best part of the trip, and I said without hesitation, meeting this interesting couple.  We hope to see them again.

Monsieur Robert served us crepes Suzette. We dined in style with a French chef. We have landed on our feet in Digby Nova Scotia.

As if this visit was not enough, we had another one the next day.

After that strange experience, the next day was even stranger. We continued our conversation with our new young Quebec friends who like us were here for a few days and were joined by 2 interesting American women. We have a long and lovely chat with all 4 of them. It lasted even longer than the first day. We stayed and talked right through the morning until Monsieur Robert came to let the American women gently know that they had to leave as they had to clean the room before the new guests arrived.

We talked about everything under the sun, but particularly the fascinating laws of the sea. We even got into some politics, which is often difficult with Americans. Of course, these women were New Englanders, not Trumpsters.

We had never talked with anyone that long at a B & B before. And we have stayed at many B & B’s.  The American women wanted to stay longer but the rooms were all booked. That was a pity. For us all.

Burntcoat Head Park. Burntcoat Head Park is on the coast of the Bay of Fundy in Mi’Kmaq territory and the District of Sipekne’katik, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people. It is always important to recognize such facts and the park did exactly that.

It also claims to be the exact site of the highest tides in the world. The Bay of Fundy of which it is a part claims to have the highest tides and it is because of this area. And it was also home to a lovely islet just a short walk away down to the beach.

The Guinness Book of World Records (1975) declared that Burntcoat had the highest tides in the world: “The greatest tides in the world occur in the Bay of Fundy…. Burntcoat Head in the Minas Basin, Nova Scotia, has the greatest mean spring range with 14.5 metres (47.5 feet) and an extreme range of 16.3 metres (53.5 feet).” That is good enough for me, though I admit there is some controversy about which tides are actually the biggest. The National Geographic made a similar claim in its August 1957 magazine: “The famous tides of the Bay of Fundy move with deceptive quiet. Sheltered from the open sea, they ebb and flood to a recorded range unequal in the rest of the world.”

Twice each day the tides rise and fall in the Bay of Fundy and cause  60 billion tonnes of water to flow in and out of the Bay of Fundy each day!  That is incredible when you stop to think about it. The average tide in the bay is 47.5 ft high and the highest is 53.6 ft.

Like most coastal tides, Burntcoat Head experiences two high tides and two low tides each day. The Bay of Fundy fills and empties with approximately 160 billion tonnes of water twice a day. On average it takes 6 hours and 13 minutes between high and low tide. As soon as the tide has reached its lowest or highest point, it will change directions, and either begin to come to shore or flow back out. The timing of the tides changes by approximately by one hour daily. Spring tides happen twice per month when the Sun, Moon, and Earth are aligned. During this alignment, the tides raise higher than average. Neap tides occur during the first and third quarter moon. During this time the high tide heights are lower than average.

There was also a lighthouse here but it was a bit of a dud though it had an interesting history. The first lighthouse was built in 1858, before Confederation on land that later was transformed into an island. The lighthouse had 5 oil lamps with reflectors that the keepers had to clean every day!  The narrow “neck” of land on which it was built connected it to the mainland until that neck was eroded into oblivion.  The power of the sea, unlike the power of men and women, is relentless.  After that the people who worked on the lighthouse had to climb up bank of the beach by means of a ladder.

In 1979 a man and his son, George and Sandy Hyrnewich, searching the beach found a fossil of a creature that had never been discovered or identified before. It was the skull of a reptile that was 20 cm long and came from the late Triassic period more than 220 million years ago. That was before there were any dinosaurs on the planet. It is now called, appropriately, Teraterpeton Hyrnewich. The first part of the name means “wonderful creeping thing” in Latin and the second part is of course their name. As erosion in the Bay of Fundy continues, other strange fossils may be found.

The Bay of Fundy originated when the world’s continents were all joined as one in what scientists now called the supercontinent Pangaea, which means one earth,  230 million years ago, about the time the wonderful creeping thing was creeping. Pangaea started to break apart. At that time a very large rift valley started to form, where the Bay of Fundy is now found. Braided rivers probably blown through the region and hot dry winds blew sand into dunes that today form the red sandstone that is so visible today in Burntcoat and other places in Nova Scotia.