As I write this post, I’m sitting in the sunshine on the beautiful south shore of Nova Scotia! These are the views out the window beside me.

With this trip, we’re killing four birds with one stone. First of all, we celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary on Sunday and we wanted to do that somewhere other than home. We spent the weekend in Halifax where we stayed in a lovely Victorian bed and breakfast that is older than the town we live in! Ascendence Harbourside Mansion was built in 1891 for the Auditor General of Nova Scotia. We stayed in the luxurious Auditor’s Suite. Our hosts went above and beyond, placing chocolates and fresh flowers in our room when they learned that it was our anniversary. The breakfasts were wonderful and we had a great time visiting with the other guests around the table each morning.

Our main reason for choosing Nova Scotia as the destination for our anniversary trip was the fact that we’ve been wanting to return to Mahone Bay for another visit with the pen pal that I inherited when Richard’s mother passed away. The two little girls began writing to one another when they were 11 years old. When Mother passed away in 1993, the family asked me to write her pen pal to let her know. In return, I received a beautiful letter from Myrna telling me that she didn’t want to lose touch with the family that she’d known only through letters for so many years. I began writing to her and the relationship between our two families has now been going on for 77 years! As I write this, I’m sitting in her son’s living room three doors down the road from her house at Indian Point, just outside the beautiful little town of Mahone Bay. You can read about our first visit in 2009 here.

The third reason for this trip was our longtime desire to see the spectacular colours of eastern Canada in the fall. So far, everyone here has been apologizing for the fact that the trees aren’t in full autumn colour yet due to the extreme lack of rain in this area this year, but we are still seeing colour we would never see at home! Hopefully we’ll see more before we return to Alberta over a week from now.

Lastly, we had lots of Air Miles to use up before they begin expiring on Dec. 31. We’ve been collecting them for years and had enough saved to pay for our flights and our little rental car and still have enough left over for a mid winter vacation!

Stay tuned for future posts and pictures as we continue our travels. Right now, the sun is shining and the locale is too beautiful to spend any more time sitting at my keyboard!