So about those e-pushpins – they continue to get added even as we’re traveling. I like chatting up locals and often get comments like: you gotta visit XYZ!! And then there’re the e-pushpins that add themselves like: there’s something wrong with the brakes on our 6-ton RV – where’s the nearest brake service!? Each addition often spawns a few more (why waste a visit to an unexpected town?) and so the pushpin count continues to grow.
On our way to Kejimkujik NP we noticed the front wheel on the driver’s side was maybe pulling a little bit and the front wheel was getting pretty warm. Doug’s expert diagnosis was a stuck caliper. Have we been driving around with the front brake on? Not good. He did some research, made some calls, and found a shop as close as possible to Kejimkujik that could fit us into their schedule (and into their garage!) a little later in the week. Well, let’s sit tight at the park for a couple of more days and head out early on Thursday morning. Can we find a few things to do in and around Bridgewater?
When we arrived, the people at South Shore Tire & Auto had found us a new caliper, confirmed the problem and replaced the bad caliper, pads and rotor. I found a laundromat less than 1 k (0.6 mi) away and made good use of the time. That left the rest of the day to do a little touring and road-testing.
The town of Lunenburg, a half-hour drive from Bridgewater, was already an e-pushpin. According to the NYT, it is a cute town to visit with historical significance – perfect for an afternoon out-and-back excursion. It turns out that whenever the British claimed a new settlement, they were ordered by the king to build using a pre-planned ‘model town’ layout of compact lots in a rectangular grid. Although this worked well for level tracts of land like Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON, (yup, been there!), it made for interesting challenges on the steeply sloping land of the peninsula selected for Lunenburg in the 1750’s. Narrow streets that run between the top of the ridge and the waterfront have a ‘Streets of San Francisco’ vibe (a great test bed for our new brakes!). There’s been little change to the 400 colorful structures that make up the Old Town of Lunenburg, preserving the original architecture (yes, they’ve added indoor plumbing…).
We’d also found that Bridgewater has a free music concert series with performances every Thursday night. The performance is an outdoor theatre at Pijinuiskaq Park on the LaHave River, right downtown with several nearby restaurants. After a quick dinner of interesting pizza, we walked over to the venue to learn (somewhat thankfully) that because of the heat wave the performance had been moved to an alternative indoor location across the bridge, conveniently close to where we’d parked the RV. Foggy Deeds is a 6-member band from Halifax that plays classic Celtic tunes and traditional songs of Atlantic Canada. The lead singer’s strong voice anchors the band, three of the instrumentalists (guitar, bouzouki, & stand-up bass) fill out the vocal space nicely with harmony and backup, and the melodic rhythm and fills from the fiddle and the accordion make for a very enjoyable sound.
A camper I met in Freeport, NS, lives in this area and suggested a visit to the white sand beaches on the Atlantic coast. Hirtle’s Beach, another half-hour drive from Bridgewater, is one such beach. The drive through the little village near the beach in Kingsburg was classically attractive with a Fine-Homebuilding-on-the-beach sort of feel, where it seemed like the residents really enjoy beach life. The beach itself is a 3-mile crescent, where the sand blends into pebbles washed in with the tide, surrounded by green cliffs. We initially questioned the white sand, because the beach sand looked a lot like what we’re used to seeing along the New England coast. However, most of the coast of Nova Scotia is reddish sandstone or very dark volcanic basalt, in comparison to which I can agree – Hirtle’s Beach is white!
We enjoyed our serependipitous visits while in Bridgewater. Time to move on to explore another area of Nova Scotia.
For anyone interested, more Lunenburg, Hirtle’s Beach pix…
