Happy National Acadien Day from Yarmouth, NS!

Today, Wednesday, August 15, 2018, is National Acadien Day in Canada, and what better place to celebrate it than in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, on the Acadian Shore?

We'll preview our big celebration, which was purely accidental.  We had Rappie Pie at the Yarmouth County Museum!

The Acadians in Nova Scotia like to have molasses on Rappie Pie, so, of course, this is how we had it.  We celebrated with what looked like various locals, who were the only ones who knew about the Museum's celebration.  A hefty CAN7$ per person for this scrumptious Acadien meal!

Now back to our regular story.  We had planned to bicycle into Yarmouth from our campground in Arcadia, a nearby town, and then on to the Cape Forchu Lighthouse -- but the weather didn't cooperate.  When we were up and ready to leave, it was a misty drizzle and foggy outside.  We decided to hedge our bet and just drive.  We were bummed by this because a great bike trail passes right by our campground that would have taken us right to the Yarmouth Waterfront.  Another few kilometers' pedalling and we would have been to the lighthouse.  Oh, well.

When we arrived at the lighthouse, the fog had closed in, and little David had a hard time seeing the lighthouse and keeper's cottage from where he sat:

A little closer, and we could make out the light and cottage.  This shape of lighthouse is affectionately called an "apple core" because of its shape.  The original lighthouse was constructed in 1839 due to the very high number of shipwrecks near the Yarmouth Harbour, and was operational in 1840. The original station slowly deteriorated and was eventually demolished in 1961 and replaced in 1962 with the "apple core" - a concrete tower. Since 2000, the original fresnel lens used at the lighthouse has been located at the Yarmouth County Museum -- where we had our Rappie Pie lunch!  More on that later.

As we climbed up to the lighthouse, the fog cleared slightly and gave us a better view of the lighthouse:

Here is an unobstructed view of the "apple core" design of the light:

The cottage is now a museum and cafe, and it has all of the usual exhibits about the history of the light, the lightkeepers who have tended it, and other related matters.  Kathy found this old feller sitting out back and hoped he would fill her in on the real scoop about the light:

Because the light tower is only 1.5 meters wide (barely wide enough for one person to climb it), the public isn't allowed up in the tower.  However, poking our noses into an outbuilding, we found more displays about the lighthousekeeper's work, and we were allowed to activate a display that caused the old light to blaze and the old foghorn to sound.

Cape Forchu is taken from the French for "forked cape" because it has been formed by forking veins of basalt that thrust up from the Gulf of Maine.  Hiking trails let us explore further out to the point.  As we looked back at the lighthouse, we got a slightly different view of it:

Primrose were everywhere, as were many other wildflowers, because this is the prime growing season in the Maritimes, and the flowers must achieve their goals in a very short time.  We even spotted a sizeable number of white primrose, which we've rarely seen:

To the northwest of Cape Forchu is an inlet named "False Harbour," so named because in early sailing days the boats that plied these waters would often mistake the inlet for Yarmouth Harbour.  However, it would only lead them to shipwreck in churning waves on large basalt rock formations.  Large numbers of vessels met their fate in this way, which is the main reason the light was commissioned.  Here is a view of the rocks and waves in False Harbour:

An interesting side note to Cape Forchu is that it is the location where a quartzsite slab known as the "Yarmouth Runic Stone" was discovered here in the early 1800's. The stone appears to have an inscription carved into it, which some investigators have interpreted as Norse runes. This has led to speculation that the Yarmouth area was visited by Viking explorers -- perhaps Leif Erickson -- sometime around 1000 AD. Many other theories have been put forward, including the possibility of a hoax. The Stone is currently on display at the Yarmouth County Museum.  When we learned about it, we had to go visit the Museum and get a photo of the Runic Stone.  And here it is: 

Chasing down the Runic Stone was the original reason we visited the Yarmouth County Museum, and it was only when we arrived that we discovered it was celebrating National Acadien Day with lunches of Rappie Pie.  So we interrupted our runic investigations for a lovely lunch, and then resumed with a tour of the museum.  As it happens, the Fresnel lens from the original Cape Forchu lighthouse is on display here too, as well as models of the many ships that met their untimely end in False Harbour:

The Museum also has an exhibit on the Acadians, and, sadly, also on the Great Expulsion, which, if you've read our blog, you know occured in the 1860's and involved the British forcibly evicting the Acadiens from their homeland, with many to be shipped to France, the Caribbean, and Cajun Louisiana:

We've enjoyed seeing the many deep connections between Acadian culture and Cajun culture, and here at the Museum we found yet one more -- a display of Acadian squeezeboxes, the direct ancestors of Cajun squeezeboxes of Louisiana!  It had been our impression that Cajuns incorporated accordians into their musical culture after they arrived in Louisiana, but this seems to pretty definitively show us that accordians were part of Acadian life long before Louisiana.

Having visited the Yarmouth County Museum, which is in the historical district of Yarmouth, we decided to finish up with a walk around the district to look at all the Victorian era houses built by sea captains in the neighborhood.  Each has the remnants of the old widow's walks (where anxious wives of sea captains could climb and look out for their husbands' boats to return to port after dangerous weeks fishing at sea.  We found this house to be particularly unique.  It appears that this house boasts an enclosed "widow's attic" in place of the widow's walk:

Again, as with all our stays, this was too short.  We need to move on tomorrow, but we're excited because it will give us a chance to get to start exploring that magnificent Bay of Fundy!