Queenie is having terrible problems with her wifi at the moment, so posting may be delayed….
Effing internet. What effing use is it if you can’t get onto it.
Well, if you can do nothing else in Nova Scotia, you can eat well. Of course you can do lots of things here, but ohmygod you can eat well. Queenie has a taut swelled bump of a midriff after two weeks of the Queen Parents being here.
Last weekend, I brought them down the Valley. Down the Valley is the Annapolis Valley, which is the farming area of Nova Scotia. It was generally agreed that it was very like Ireland. Although it is mostly dyked reclaimed land so it is like Ireland if Ireland were Holland.
We stayed in a B&B in a little village called Canning, which has apple blossom everywhere, and a number of Baptist churches, and nothing else. The breakfasts were amazing. First of all, you got fresh juice, coffee and warm muffins served to your room at 7.30. Then you had an enormous breakfast at 8.30. Then we went in the car on a little jaunt somewhere. Unfortunately, Tropical Storm Beryl crashed onto the South Shore and across Nova Scotia that weekend. SO. IT. POURED. ALL. WEEKEND. Apart from one day, Saturday I think.
We did mostly tourist stuff – went to the Habitacion in Annapolis which is a reconstruction of the original French settlement of 1705. And the Acadian museum in Grand Pre which marks the Grand Derangement, the deportation of 10,000 Acadians from Nova Scotia by perfidious Albionists. And pottered around Wolfville, which is where I Wwoofed last summer and which is a nice university town a bit like a small version of Kilkenny. If Kilkenny had clapboard houses and was by the sea.
There was always a nice lunch in a European run bistro about two pm. Then back to the B&B for reading and afternoon tea, which usually involved some kind of very nice chocolate cake.
Then we picked a restaurant and headed off to eat more at 7.30, which is of course horrendously late in Nova Scotia. But still, there needed to be a bit of space in order to clear the stomach for a further filling.
Wolfville has many great restaurants, but the best three are The Tempest, Actons, and Between the Bushes, in that order I think. The Tempest is a chef-owner, very trendy European type bistro, all of whose servers are resting actors I think. Actons is a more high-brow, professional server type formal dining type place, with a focus on fish and steaks, and Between the Bushes is a lovely farmhouse restaurant in the middle of a blueberry farm with nice sunsets and all kinds of interesting fauna. Of course, Wolfville has the Blomidon Inn as well, which is supposed to be the best, but it’s a bit expensive for us.
Anyways, after that it was back to the B&B again for thankfully, rest not more food and a big long sleep until it was time to eat muffins again. Before that though Queenie had to reverse the car into the parking spot every night, which involved the Queen Father getting out and giving her complicated hand signals which she couldn’t see in the dark and then she would make a complete shite of the whole thing and get a lecture about parking. Which would go down like a lead banana of course.
Since we got back to Halifax we have been alternating eating in and eating out and sampling the delights of Haligonian cooking, which are multitudinal also. And as tonight was our last night together as a group of four, we went to Chives.
Chives of course starred in my blog nearly a year ago as the site of the wedding feast of Mr. and Mrs. Monkey. And very nice it was then and very nice it was tonight too. Although the table wasn’t decorated as prettily :->
So, just the one night left and the QPs will be winging their way back to Ireland. I wonder what impressions they will be bringing with them?
They met Himself and various politicians that Queenie works for and Hotspur the Goddess of Spin of course and some of Himself’s family, so that was all good. And Halifax seemed to grow on them once they figured out the buses and the waterfront and the grid system and that. Maybe not enough defined shopping areas for the Queen Mum to browse in.
And the Queen Dad and Queenie did the Harbour Hopper today, which is the Nova Scotian equivalent of the Viking Splash.
Today it was so hot it was almost too hot and our room is like an oven tonight so we will have to use the fan for the first time this year. August will be hot hot hot. Not as hot as BC, where temperatures of over 40 degrees are being recorded in Kelowna and Nanaimo and the forest fires are raging fiercely.
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