Nova Scotia

I've made another in my provincial series. The shape of Nova Scotia is covered with its provincial symbols: the osprey and the mayflower. The block was inked 'à la poupée' (with different colours, green, pinks, yellow and gray-brown, in different areas) and printed by hand on lovely Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper. Each print is 23.5 cm by 31.8 cm (9.25" by 12.5"). The print is one of a variable edition of eight.

This print was troublesome for me. Firstly, I had the opposite issue as with Saskatchewan. As all schoolchildren know Saskatchewan is the hardest to spell, easiest to draw. I mean, it's basically a rectangle. Sure, Canada is so large that you can see the small-circle curvature fo the latitudes marking the north and south boundaries, and there's been a correction to the original purely rectalinear area, and there are some notable lakes, but basically, its shape is so simple that the viewer might not recognize it was a map. Nova Scotia and for that matter, the remaining Maritime provinces, PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador are so irregularly shaped that it's a challenge to avoid having the shape of the map dominate the design. How was I to squish an Osprey into that space, unless I incresed the scale, or, my solution, I did not attempt to show the entire animal.

Lastly, the inks themselves gave me trouble. Inking 'à la poupée' is an acquired skill, but I think that the other trouble was the dryness of the air. It's pretty cold out there and no amount of ink retarder seemed able to keep my inks nice and viscous today. But, here we are. Province print number 8 with two more provinces and three territories to go.

I was tempted to sneak the Bluenose in there, but that would just confuse matters.

Maybe it's appropriate to make a Nova Scotia print on Robbie Burns Day.

Truro to Lunenberg, then home

On our drive from Truro to Lunenberg we saw a mastodon on the side of the road, so, we of course had to stop. You see, they found a mastodon skeleton near Stewiacke, "Halfway between the North Pole and the Equator", at confluence of the Stewiacke and Shubenacadie River. (One of RJH's favorite pastimes on this trip was "make the Toronto girl attempt to pronounce maritime place names". I fared miserably and was advised not to refer to places by name in front of locals). Actually, what we saw was a very cheesy little tourist trap named Mastodon Ridge (scientific value: extremely dubious). But, it gave RJH an excuse to photograph me with the 'Mastodon'.




Yes, it's the least-welcoming Flintstones playground of all time: "Play at own risk" and "DANGER: Do not climb this house". (Caveat: the Mastodon in question was, apparently, 20 thousand years old, and while the arrival of the earliest peoples in North American remains subject to debate, 20,000 years ago is generally considered much too early... and I'm not even going to comment on the Flintstones nature of the building and ahem, vehicle.)



Then, we continued to Lunenberg, where we were able to have lunch and take some photos.








Here, the lobster don tams, rather than sou'westers. Regional variations in lobster headgear is what it's all about.



Then we drove to Halifax airport, which proved to be very challenging. We were behind the World's Most Cautious truck driver for most of the way on a single lane road. Nonetheless, we made it on time, and got our boarding passes with help from the aggressively friendly ground staff. One security officer addressed me as "m'dear" and the other as "sweetie" which seemed a bit much. Does being in Nova Scotia mean this is standard?

It was a great trip.

Bay of Fundy and the Joggins Fossil Cliffs

So we left the Hopewell Rocks and headed north, through Moncton, where we didn't stop. RJH had to live there for a year, and it remains on his list of least favorite places, though he confessed he may be biased. We stopped briefly in Sackville, where I had to photograph the ladies' room sign for my stickmen-in-peril series. The men's room figure did not show any such signs of desperation, so it was a pretty funny comment on gender (& bladder size/propensity to stop driving to let the other person use the facilities, etc.). We stopped again for ice cream, which was good, though served by the world's least enthusiastic ice cream scooper. "I hate ice cream," she said, "and it's nothing by ice cream, all summer. I do like popsicles though." After the 2 minute tour of Mount Allison University, we went across to Nova Scotia and headed for Joggins.

We had read about the fossils, but were unsure of what to expect. It was almost 4 pm and we were worried about paying admission, closing time, and high tide, at this UNESCO World Heritage Site (for those keeping score, this was number four, after Peggy's Cove, Lunenberg, and the Hopewell Rocks). When we got there however, we found that there was no admission fee unless you go to the museum and we were free to explore on our own as long as we want, though we were given some stern advice about the tides as this is also on the Bay of Fundy. Incredibly, the museum at this amazing site -a site instrumental to Charles Lyell's thinking and hence to his friend Darwin's Theory of Evolution - receives no Provincial or Federal funding. RJH pointed out that there's really nothing stopping anyone from walking off with large pieces of fossilized Carboniferous (359 to 299 Million Years Ago) trees! I do think Canada should protect this place; it is part of World Heritage.

Actually, based on this stickman in peril panel, the warnings about walking the shoreline could have been more severe. In hindsight, we were too close to the cliffs, in an effort to avoid the rising tide. I started seeing fossils as soon as we got to the beach. Generally I use the geologist's trick of photographing rocks with something (a dime with the Bluenose, as this is Nova Scotia) for scale. It was very easy to pick out the coal stream in the cliff face strata. Click on any photo to see a larger version, or the full photo stream (where there are more fossils).






See! It's a tropical tree. Right there. Nothing for scale - it was regular tree-trunk size.













By the time we finished our walk, the museum was closed. Since we were concerned how far we could get before we would need a hotel for the night, we did not follow the coast along the Bay, but cut down to Parrsboro. We saw the coast from the highway and took a small road to the water, somewhere between Parrsboro and Economy. Because I'm silly I was highly amused by the town of 'Lower Economy'.





We spent the night in Truro (also on RJH's list of least favorite places), but we did manage to find a restaurant which wasn't serving fast food. I'm glad to report we never resorted to McLobster.