Canada Day 150 in Lunenburg, NS

Before the 4th of July comes July 1st...which doesn't mean much to Americans but here in Canada, it's a big deal.  It is their 150th birthday!!  We arrived in Lunenburg on Friday, June 30 - just in time to get some rest before the big day.  We had a great time exploring the town and learning more about this great little gem on the east coast of Nova Scotia.

Lunenburg was originally settled in the 1700s, when the British sent a group of protestants to settle the area (thereby kicking out the natives) and set up farming plots.  Unfortunately, it's not a great place to farm due to the cold harsh winters so that's when fishing took over.  That lasted for a hundred years or so until the world found out that this is a prime location for cod and haddock and the fisherman began to outnumber the fish and the area has now been overfished and the supplies depleted faster than can be sustained.  At one point in the 90's, the Canadian Prime Minister put a moratorium on fishing and it was a loss of approximately 40,000 jobs around Canada.  So the local industry adapted and evolved to focus on tourism.  Today, Lunenburg has tour buses arriving daily and the locals celebrate their history and Canadian pride.

We have enjoyed this awesome little town.  The mornings and nights are cool, with temperatures in the mid-50s and the days are sometimes as high as mid-70s.  Some days are rainy but some are hot and sunny!  Everybody has been so friendly and welcoming and the pubs have tasty beer.  We are so glad this was our first stop on our journey north.

Terrapin in the anchorage in front of town

Celebratory passage beers!! 

...and fish and chips.  I'm not sure if there is any other option on the Lunenburg menus.

Pints in Canada are between 18 - 20 oz, not the pesky 16 in the rest of the world.

Walking around town

Kala on her first dinghy ride after six days offshore - we couldn't get there fast enough.

St John's Anglican Church - a cool story about this but to be brief, the blue mural is the night sky as it looked over Lunenburg on the day Jesus was born.  It was first painted in 1754 - think of the math it took to figure out the star positions almost 2,000 years prior.

The mural was destroyed in a fire in 2001 and then repainted back to the original

The Mariner's Window in St John's