East Coast Adventuring

May 21, 2025

My mum mentioned on our group messenger between her, my two sisters and I that she had a West Jet buddy pass that was expiring soon, so I jumped on it. The last time I went on a trip with my mum, it was when Megan, mum and I went to Hawaii in August, 2022. I thought it would be fun to explore Eastern Canada where we could spend some time with my high school best friend, Carol, who lives in Nova Scotia and who my mum knows quite well, as well as visit my friend Laura who lives New Brunswick.

I was researching and getting ideas of places to visit from friends and people who both visited and previously lived in Eastern Canada, and when I asked my mum if she had anything specific, she wanted to see or do, she happily she was up for anything and that she'd just go with the flow. So, my goal of the trip was to spend as much time outside as possible.

This is one of the few times I've traveled having my own source of transportation, and what a luxury it was to stop and go wherever we pleased, instead of being restricted to what we saw due to proximity of location or someone else's schedule (aka public transit). After a night at an Airbnb close to the airport, we left Halifax, without ever actually going into the city since the airport is located outside of it, which I thought was no love lost, and went on a walk around Scots Bay, which was a 7KM path we followed that enclosed us in trees, but gave us a preview of some of the gorgeous views we would see over the next few days in both provinces, as there were lookout areas that gave us views to the water. This was the first of many trekking adventures on our trip.

On our way to Carol's, we drove through several towns that all seemed to blend into one another or were separated by large plots of lands for vegetable crops come summer and orchards of apples and other fruits. The houses had character that you rarely see in British Columbia, being that they're so much older and have the Victorian style rather than the contemporary repeat box styles. 

Carol is how I got into running. Most of our time in high school together was spent jogging throughout our hometown in Greenwood, BC, or walking uptown. We completed our first half marathon together when we both when to university in Calgary. She also chose me to be her maid of honor when she married her husband. We spend a couple days at Carol's house, and we got caught up on each other's life. It was so wonderful getting to know her three tiny humans with snippets of conversations and painting nails. Carol and her husband moved to Novia Scotia where she matched for her residency and has since become a General Physician. This province is now their home. Getting caught up with Carol was good for my soul; She knew so much about me throughout high school and university, it was nice to see how far I've grown from my youth. When asking questions about Mike, as they have yet to meet, she reminded me that Mike has crossed all the things off of my No List: no marriage, no house, no children. It made me laugh about how sure I was about myself when I was 18 and even 29, the year before Mike and I met.

This trip was also focused on food: we enjoyed popular local apples, which were huge and crisp. We also tried the famous crab bun, which is locally caught snow crab smothered in dill-mayonnaise and put into a hoagie style bun - amazing. While waiting to catch our ferry to head over to New Brunswick, we ate large local sea scallops in Digby. They were really good, and I couldn't resist sending a picture of our meal to Mike (his favorite seafood), but honestly, my favorite part of the meal was the Waldorf salad.

Our last stop before getting catching the ferry was Annapolis Royal, scoring great lattes and then purchasing the coffee beans from that cafe, and walking around this historical site.  The history of Novia Scotia is incredible, as it's so much older than the Westcoast. The town of Annapolis Royal was known as Port-Roal in 1605. In 1613 it was seized by the British and then in '32 was restored to France by treaty. Acadia was ceded to Britain in 1713, and Port-Royal was re-named Annapolis Royal. They used the natural contours of the land to build trench like areas and the water sources was a perfect was to view and take down boats. It then served as the centre of military and administrative operations for the new British colony of Nova Scotia until 1749 when Halifax became the provincial capital. I'm really big into reading historical fiction, specifically WWII, so to see how much Canada has been through was a gentle reminder to think about our own history and our concerning future. 

Laura's house was a lovely old white farmhouse with a wraparound porch situated on a few acres of land on a remote backroad - ironically a few hundred meters from a brewery and pizza place.  With two cats and two dogs, the inside of her house was anything but the quiet and calm that the exterior of the house gave off, it was pure, happy chaos, with the best of vibes. I met Laura that time I spent a ski season in Golden, BC when I was 27, as my upstairs neighbor for all of 30 days (both of us relocated to different rentals), she asked me to look after her and split the costs of wifi. After that, we spend many a days driving red wine, discussing feminism and politics and eating homemade mac and cheese. In Golden, my work life was awful, but my personal life was never more fun, between the nurse friends I seemed to have accumulated and the weekends of cross-country skiing and snowboarding. No only did I meet Laura's pets, but I met her husband. With ciders in hand, reminisced over our Golden Days, and discussed the current events of the world. I forgot just how much I had in common with my red headed friend, and how much I missed having her in my life.

We continued on stopping at a hike that I had found on google maps called Eye of the Needle where there was several trekking and walking paths in the area. There was an information booth nearing the ending stages of renovations, but an employee came out in a state of concern when we mentioned wanting to complete this hike. The sight of my mum and I in our burks and leggings sans coats made him leery about providing us directions to the trail head, explaining that the difficulty of the hike and the unpreparedness of the hikers have lead to more hele-vacs that he'd care to count. We laughed as we slowly made our way down the trail, as the gradual slopes became ever steeper, where we were offered ropes and chains to hold onto, and the sounds of running water became less distant.  The moss-covered scenery was beautiful, certainly my favorite hike of the handful of adventures we went on that week. We followed a creak that ebbed and flowed as the volume of the water increased at times. Finally, we came to some warning signs as the path lead right into the water. Apparently being "up for anything" did not include rock hopping through a river in order to get to the end of whatever the Eye of the Needed meant. Mum was a complete trooper as we make our way back to the car, which meant climbing the steep accent where the slippery rocks were makeshift stairs and you left with no other option of going onto all fours to make your safely up the incline. 

Slowly we made our way back to the took the long way back to New Brunswick where we drove the roads that parallelled the Bay of Fundy and the beautiful views that it held. I had a great time exploring Canada with my mum and completely recommend my BC and Alberta peeps to go east on their next adventure. Canada has so much to offer, and vacations don't always have to be Mexico bound. I plan to return to hike parts of the East Coast Trial in Newfoundland. Maybe mum will be up for coming on that trek. 

Kirstin

There's no time to be bored in a country as beautiful as this.