Tab 6: Mahone Bay

“This concert has inspired me to play the clarinet again… maybe I’ll break out the old toodlephone for our wedding”
-Marco, to the horror of Adrienne

So, I’m not sure if you know this or not, but touring is a lot more fun if it’s not done in the driving rain when you leave your umbrella in the car.

This is the first day of the trip on which the weather was less than excellent and while we still had fun, it would have been funner still had we not been soaked.

Today we got in PT and drove to Mahone Bay.

Mahone Bay is about a 15 minute drive from Lunenburg. The town is quite small and basically consists of one street (Main Street, of course) that snakes along the Bay.

There are the usual pretty houses and shops

but Mahone Bay is also notable for another reason.

It is the site of the second stop on the Interprovincial Yarn Crawl of 2007: Have a Yarn.

Have a Yarn is an excellent yarn shop – the best… so far. Lots and lots of beautiful and *inexpensive* local yarn. Especially lots of Fleece Artist and Hand Maiden yarns, many of which I have not yet seen in Toronto.

I ended up buying (for under $50!!!) enough yarn three pairs of socks. The blue yarn is made by Briggs Little in New Brunswick, 80% wool/20% nylon. The purple is from the Lismore Sheep Farm in River John, Nova Scotia, 100% wool (colour: fundy fog). The green and pink multi colour is Fleece Artist from Nova Scotia, 100% machine washable merino.

After the yarn bonanza was complete and Marco had recovered from the yarn fumes enough to resume touring, we decided to drive to Blue Rocks. The rain was getting worse and we had more or less run out of town to see.

Blue Rocks is a tiny, picturesque harbour just a short drive from Lunenburg. It’s just as scenic as Peggy’s Cove but more enjoyable in that there aren’t any tourists, tourist buses, or tourist-type shops. If you want to buy a stupid plastic lighthouse or meet a whack of people from Japan on a bus tour of Canada, Blue Rocks is not the harbour for you.

In certain kinds of light, the rocks are said to glow with a blue hue… hence the name. Even though by this time it was pouring, we (and by “we” and mean “I”) decided to get out of PT to play National Geographic for a bit.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in Lunenburg, resting. I had not built “rest” time into the Tabs of Fun but for some reason Marco thinks resting should be part of a vay-kay. I disagree. You can rest when you’re dead. (Although as Marco points out, at that point you can’t enjoy it).

After (over)resting, we had dinner at Big Red’s, a family restaurant overlooking the waterfront. Big Red’s used to be the site of the Lunenburg jail…once I found this out, the jail bars inside the restaurant made a whole lot more sense.

Following dinner it was back to Mahone Bay for their summer concert series, Music at the Three Churches. The concert was at St. James Anglican Church (the yellow church from the first picture in this post) to hear the Djokic Family Quartet. This is an insanely talented family. Mom plays piano, dad plays viola, son plays violin, and daughter plays cello. There was also a woman who turned the pages for the mother as she played the piano. I think maybe this was the tone-deaf other daughter. Marco thinks not. I think they could have at least given her a tambourine.

The Djokics played Quartet in A Minor Op. 67 by Turina, Trio Op. 70 No. 1 by Beethoven, and Quartet in G Minor Op. 25 by Brahms. They were excellent. I also greatly enjoyed intermission during which we had snack time: the whole church lined up at the back for a home made cookie and some punch. I’m considering trying to implement a similar program during my articles.

Tomorrow, it’s back on the road. See you tomorrow in Shelburne and Yarmouth (depending on what the next hotel’s definition of “has internet” is).