Trip to Nova Scotia

We flew to Nova Scotia for a week-long visit over the Labor Day holiday. We had a wonderful time spending a few days with our favorite missionaries (Grandma & Grandpa Peterson), seeing the sites, and eating lots of fresh, yummy seafood (lobsters, halibut, scallops, tuna, haddock). We did a fair amount of driving and James was a pretty good sport, mostly because we let him throw a lot of rocks in the bay and eat a lot of ice cream. We visited most of Nova Scotia’s highlights: seafood markets, Halifax Public Gardens and maritime museum, Peggy’s Cove, Mahone Bay, Lunneburg, and Halls Harbor.



One of the coolest things we did while in Nova Scotia was to go whale watching. We drove out to the tip of a peninsula (Digby Neck) that juts out into the Bay of Fundy and stayed at a bed and breakfast on Brier Island. Mom and Dad were kind enough to watch James while Jay and Em went for a “3-hour tour” on the bay in search of whales. According to the whale-watching crew, we were a very fortunate group. We saw several humpback whales and they gave us a good show.

Our photos really don’t do it justice. It was amazing to be close to such awesome creatures. We saw plenty of flukes (tails) and waves (flapping fins). We also saw 2 or 3 breaches (when the whales jump out of the water) but we weren't fast enough to catch them on camera. As we were heading back in, we came across a group of 4 whales, one of which was very curious about us. This whale proceeded to swim back and forth alongside and beneath our boat. This is called a “close approach” and it was really neat. We could really get an idea of the whale’s huge size and we could smell the whale’s breath coming from his blow hole...stinky, but still cool!